Mired in Gridlock, Congress Barrels Toward a Fiscal Cliff Over Debt

With no serious budget negotiations under way in the House, Senate or White House, lawmaker are closing on a fiscal disaster, with no parachute in sight—and doing little more than arguing over blame. 

Dick Cheney had a familiar message for House and Senate Republicans when he made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill this week: The cuts coming for the Defense Department at the end of the year are very, very bad.

But Cheney, who was the architect of the Pentagon’s war-time budget and a staunch supporter of the simultaneous Bush tax cuts, had no solutions to offer his GOP audience as they grasped for some way—any way—to undo the defense cuts that most of them agreed to last summer, all while vowing to preserve the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Even for the former vice president, there are no easy answers for the mess that Democrats and Republicans have created for themselves by putting off decisions again and again about how to pay for the country’s boom-time budget in an era of high unemployment and gaping deficits. Unless Congress acts, a possible government shutdown, a debt-ceiling increase, $1.2 trillion in spending cuts (including $600 billion of cuts for defense), and $3 trillion of tax hikes will all hit in rapid succession over the next four and a half months.

But with no serious negotiations under way between the House, the Senate or the White House, Congress is barreling closer to the fiscal cliff that awaits the country, with no parachute in sight, and did little more this week than argue over who deserves more of the blame.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/mired-in-gridlock-congress-barrels-toward-a-fiscal-cliff-over-debt.html