The powerful House Ways and Means Committee, in charge of taxes and
entitlements, will have to guide America away from the fiscal cliff
before January – but it remained paralyzed to do anything about it on
Thursday.
The committee met for a brief 20 minutes behind closed doors, and was unable to move the ball forward at all on averting the tax increases and indiscriminate spending cuts that are due to hit around the end of the year. Analysts have said the full weight of that so-called fiscal cliff would likely lead to a recession.
With the hotly contested election season underway, Ways and Means members on both sides of the aisle stressed that November's results would play an outsized role in fiscal cliff negotiations, and suggested they were trying to lay the groundwork that would allow them to hit the ground running when they returned for a lame-duck session. That groundwork so far involves information gathering, but concrete negotiating cannot begin.
“We didn’t discuss the fiscal cliff, but not because we don’t have face it. We do,” Ranking Member Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said afterward.
Asked why the committee cannot begin work on solving the fiscal cliff, he said: “There is an election.”
Thursday's get-together marked a second consecutive day filled with meetings on year-end issues, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner meeting with a number of top lawmakers, including Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and members of the Senate Finance Committee meeting Wednesday with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/250801-paralyzed-tax-writers-unable-to-act-on-fiscal-abyss
The committee met for a brief 20 minutes behind closed doors, and was unable to move the ball forward at all on averting the tax increases and indiscriminate spending cuts that are due to hit around the end of the year. Analysts have said the full weight of that so-called fiscal cliff would likely lead to a recession.
With the hotly contested election season underway, Ways and Means members on both sides of the aisle stressed that November's results would play an outsized role in fiscal cliff negotiations, and suggested they were trying to lay the groundwork that would allow them to hit the ground running when they returned for a lame-duck session. That groundwork so far involves information gathering, but concrete negotiating cannot begin.
“We didn’t discuss the fiscal cliff, but not because we don’t have face it. We do,” Ranking Member Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said afterward.
Asked why the committee cannot begin work on solving the fiscal cliff, he said: “There is an election.”
Thursday's get-together marked a second consecutive day filled with meetings on year-end issues, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner meeting with a number of top lawmakers, including Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and members of the Senate Finance Committee meeting Wednesday with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/250801-paralyzed-tax-writers-unable-to-act-on-fiscal-abyss
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