President Barack Obama has said that he hopes to reach an agreement with congress to avoid the looming fiscal cliff and reduce the budget deficit by Christmas.
Obama launched a massive Pr campaign to encourage voters to pile on the pressure to US lawmakers even going so far as to taking to twitter to get people to swamp Republican lawmakers inboxes and twitter accounts with requests to back Obama’s plan and keep taxes down. The hash tag in use is #My2K. As well as Twitter he launched a campaign on Facebook and many other social networking sites. This is a President who means business and knows the consequences of failure.
“Our ultimate goal is an agreement that gets our long-term deficit under control in a way that is fair and balanced,” he said at the White House.
On Wednesday the President met with middle class Americans who he said would lose up to $2,000 a month if Congress fails to uphold the middle class tax rates that will automatically shoot up if the nation tumbles over the ‘fiscal cliff’.
Obama will be pleased to see that cracks have begun to appear in the Republican stance with some revealing that they are willing to agree to increased revenues to achieve a broader deal to cut government red ink, they have generally been opposed to any tax rate increases. However, in recent days, some have indicated a willingness to agree to higher rates.
“I’m glad to see – if you’ve been reading the papers lately – that more and more Republicans in Congress seem to be agreeing with this idea that we should have a balanced approach,” he said. “Now is the time for us to work on what we all agree to, which is let’s keep middle-class taxes low,” he said. “And if we get this part of it right, then a lot of the other issues surrounding deficit reduction in a fair and balanced and responsible way are going to be a whole lot easier. Do what it takes to communicate a sense of urgency. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
“I believe that both parties can agree on a framework that does that in the coming weeks. In fact, my hope is to get this done before Christmas,” Obama added.
Of course we have heard that phrase before, most famously in the dreadful days of World War One when foolish generals said the conflict would be ‘over by Christmas’, which escalated into the bloodiest armed conflict in history, so let’s hope that Obama is right and the deal is made then. If not the consequences for the US and world economy’s could be dire.
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