The major sticking points remain the same, Congressional Democrats want to raise taxes on the highest income earners while keeping the current lower tax rates in place for the middle class. Republicans want to extend tax breaks at all levels. Good morning and welcome to washington journal. We are going to be talking about the fiscal cliff, the statements the House Speaker made about being a stalemate and what the president said during his trip to a toy factory in pennsylvania. Here are the numbers. You can also reach out to us by email and twitter and facebook, all of the social media as. On twitter the addresses cspanwj, facebook. Com cspan. More from the article by jake sherman with the headline fiscal cliff. He writes lets go to the phones. The first call comes from debbie in flint, mich. On the line for democrats. Caller i think they need to pass a law that these guys did not get paid. If i go to work and did not do my job, they will not pay me. They have not done their jobs in the years. They need to listen to the American People. We picked barack obama up for a reason because we like his policies. They need to get a clue. They are already struggling and having a hard time. If they do not get a clue, they will not be back there. Host republicans say the president and democrats are not making any goodfaith offers, the same thing democrats say about republicans. How do we get them to move past with the speaker is calling a stalemate . Caller the people need to look at their actions, not what people are saying. These obstructionists have locked down congress for years now. They are just continuing to do it. They refuse to admit to obama has a mandate to tax these rich people. Just the other day the Corporate Income is up to 1175 trillion dollars. These corporations are sitting on this money. They sat on it all through the election to make obama look bad. I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but you have to look at what people are doing, not what they say they are doing. Host all right. Lets move on to linda from tallahassee, florida. Caller i have been very disappointed in the republicans myself, and i have been a republican for a long time. This pastime i could not even vote republican because i was so aggravated in what i felt was misinformation from them. I am in the top 5 of american wealth. We owed nobody we have no bills. We know plenty of bakers. We felt these people were taking advantage would you are in the banking business, it is a public trust issue. They do not to make these loans and they made them anyway. I said, you should not be making these loans, it is not a good loan. It made them. They are not going to jail for it. Nobody on wall street is going to jail. As a republican and a christian, if we are not holding their feet to the fired to do better it acts like christians and try to come to the table and figure out how to fix the problem that we have here, i pay all of my bills. Everybody that does business with me, she pays her bills. If it means she has to go without, as a goes without. Host lets move onto brian from utah on the line for independents. Caller this is ridiculous. They just spend, spend, spend it. The first sign of failure is blaming somebody else, and that is all obama does. He does not want to fix nothing. They also take a cut in pay. Right at the bottom in the fine print where nobody read is congress and senate, they take a cut in pay and they get no Health Insurance and nothing. Then maybe they might fix the sucker. Host in the financial times, they have this headline. Back to the phones. Michael is on the line for democrats. Caller how are you doing today . They really need somebody to negotiate with. Everybody knows john boehner does not have the power to negotiate. He needs to get the middleman out of the way and go onto eric cantor and negotiate with eric cantor, he does have the power. Host why does the majority leader, rip eric cantor have the power you say the speaker does not have . Caller because john boehner has been boxed in. Everything he does when he goes back, he tells barack obama one thing, but when he goes back to his caucus and comes back, he has something different. Eric cantor is wanting to be speaker of the house. Everybody knows that. John boehner has no power, he is a middle man. From lets move onto dean the line for republicans. Caller base spend around all day trying to name a post office after somebody rather than the real issues of the day. I suggest we mail all of these people a rope, not so they can safely rappel off of the fiscal cliff so they can hang themselves during the next election. That is what will probably happen to a lot of them. Lets get this Problem Solved it for christmas. Host do you think that will happen before christmas . Lets move on to tally on the line for independence. Caller i have been watching the coverage of this thing. I wish the media would turn these guys off until they have something to report that they did rather than reporting what they cannot do. The coverage reminds me of kids on the playground when one little kid says something bad about another kid and then the media and the media goes to the next kid. All of the back and forth reminds me of children on a playground. They should shut them off until they say they have something to report. It seems they are professional talkers, and not doers. That is my opinion on this matter. Host we like to show you a little bit more about what the speaker had to say and why he said he is rejecting the white house proposal that was put out thursday. [video clip] there is a stalemate. Lets not kid ourselves. I am not trying to make this more difficult. I did not want to make it harder for me or the president or members of both parties to find common ground. When i come out the day after the election and make it clear that republicans will push revenue on the table, i took a great risk. Then the white house spends three weeks trying to develop a proposal. The sun went up here that calls for 1. 60 trillion in new taxes, not even 400 billion of in cuts, and they want to have extra spending that is actually greater than the amount they are willing to cut. It was not a serious proposal. Host i want to show you a couple of items we found on twitter. Actually, facebook rather. David fisher writes that is some of the offerings that we have on facebook. Com cspan. Back to the phones. Carl is on the line for democrats. Caller are you doing . I meant to Say Something to republicans and not in a partisan kind of way. This started back but interest january of 2011. We had all of summer 2011 and the summer to where they were going to go to a Super Committee to resolve this. They did not get it done. Now into this year they still did not get it done. The november eruption basically the people said to the congress, this is what we want when the real elected president obama. I know they believe in what they want to believe, but they are in the nile. This is hurting the country. I am not trying to be partisan about this, but they have to realize you cannot deny where reality is. That is what they are doing. Host give me an idea that if he were here in washington trying to work through the debate, what would you suggest to the democrats to move forward with this problem and a meeting the republicans close to half way. Caller you cannot meet them at half way. This whole year ended nine months from when this started was when you would be meeting. The election changed the whole thing. The people decided, not the congress, but the people made the decision about this with the election. There is no renegotiating. It is almost impossible in three weeks to be talking about reform and entitlements. Host 10 on the line for republicans, go ahead. Caller we do not have a serious president. When he had all of the power, the senate, the house, and the presidency, he could not pass a budget. One guy in that room is picking up 400 of that tab. We are going to shake him down more. The next party he does not show up here that is not so good. If we had an emergency in our household called the fiscal clef. The crisis of 2008 and we had a fire. We spent an extra 30 grand to put out the fire. Now we have taken that onetime expenditure to fix that issue and written it into our baseline budget because of how the spending process works. We need to rip that out. Lets move on to rape. Lets move on to ray. Caller why well he not compromise. He says he will when talking to groups, but he does not. Harry reid, nancy pelosi, and the president knows the Republican Congress will get the blame for failures. The president will not. The media helps him. When he goes off the cliff, there is a great crisis, the republicans will get the blame. The democrats will win the house in the midterm. Host before you go, you are saying the democrats are going to stall on this so republicans get blamed and voted out of office in 2014 . Caller yes. Host why not have the democrats or the republicans come together, get this done, and run on the fact they were successful in keeping the economy from going over the fiscal cliff . Caller because the president will not compromise. Host it is just the president that is not compromising . Caller he is not. He says he is but he is not. It is his way or no way. Host we want to show you what the president had to say on his visit to a toy manufacturer and pennsylvania. He spoke about the fiscal cliff negotiations. This is what he had to say. [video clip] the reason i am here is i want the American People to urge Congress Soon to begin the work we have by doing what we all agree on. Both parties agreed we should extended the middleclass tax cuts. We have disagreements about the high end tax cuts. Republicans do not want to raise taxes on people like me. I think i can pay a little more to make sure kids can go to college and we can build roads and invest so we are finding cures for alzheimers. That is something we have to sort out. We already all agree on making sure middleclass taxes do not go up. Host this president s trip was covered in the the new york post. Back to the telephones with our discussion regarding the fiscal cliffs. Ryan is the next caller. Caller i would like somebody to call and on the republic of mine and tell me with these george w. Bush tax cuts over the past eight years, where are the jobs . If tax cuts create jobs, where are they at . That is one point. When Speaker John Boehner talks about obamacare costing so much, and government madison socialized medicine, that is what the congress gets. They are socialized medicine. If it is good for the congress and senate, but not the American People . Ont lets move on to gina the line for republicans. The last caller said he was to hear about the bush tax cuts and the jobs. What happened . Caller i do not know where the jobs are, but i can tell you if the tax cuts expire, my husband and i make under 100,000 a year in we will be hit with 4,000 in more taxes a year. What i wanted to say was, i agree with the last two previous callers. Obama does not want to compromise. Here is a fact for you. If he really wanted to compromise and he really wanted more taxes from the rich, he would talk about cutting out the loopholes. Anybody who knows anything about taxes understands that is how the top rich get by with paying no taxes. He is trying to play both sides of the fence here. He is a dictator. I hope all of you democrats who voted him and the, you will end up seeing when his term is over exactly what he is made of. Host rick on the line for independents. Caller i wanted to call in and it say i am a true conservative and republican. I love your show. It seems that with the last six months, it seems like nobody on the right can simply whether it is a republican line or whatever. They cannot express their position in and intelligently without it obviously being about their hate for obama. Even having the when gentlemen on and having to deal with people coming in with so many racial overtones. Host why do you not express how you feel about the statement . Caller i was unemployed for a little while. I am pretty savvy when it comes to finance and i do very well financially. I have not lost my understanding of where things really are. Everything john boehner is doing everything the republicans are doing, they are basically doing that so after the tax cuts expire, they come back into the office and they say, we can just go ahead and reestablish a new tax cuts. They are never on the record for doing any tax increases. But it is something that they need to do. This is the one congress that has achieved the least and president obama has nothing to do with that. He cannot fell into the stereotype so many republicans want which is so obviously racially based. Host we have a couple of items on twitter. This is from john. Back to the phones. Hilda is on the line for democrats. Caller we would not be having a fiscal cliff if we did not lead the Tea Party Republicans slip in under the radar in 2010. In 2014 we are going to sweep them out of there. Host what do the Tea Party People have to do with the fiscal cliff . Caller we would not have if this we would have a fiscal cliff if not for the Tea Party Republicans. The republicans will never agree with obama. They will never do it. They are undercover klansmen. They go up to washington and have been causing us trouble ever since. Were going to take our brains to the polls next time. Host from pennsylvania on the line for republicans. Caller a couple of points. One has to do with president obama saying we must have a balanced approach. The second one has to do with the term mandate. The third has to do with what the congress is. President obama says we must have a balanced approach to this. When i look at the term balance, i think, ok. The have revenue increases. You must also have at the same time expenditure decreases. I hear nothing but lets increase revenue, i hear nothing about decrease in expenditures. The only reference that has been made is we will do that in the out years, six years down the line. According to the constitution, every congress has the right to make the laws for it while it is in session. Putting decreased spending in the out years is not balancing it. Host john on the line for independence. Caller the president did not get a mandate. There was Something Like a 3 million votes difference. That is not a mandate. He submitted a proposal, and it has been criticized. He will have to deal with it that way. It is not balanced. One of the problems they could solve two problems they could solve is, submit the Simpson Bowles report and make the modifications that take care of things that were not in there that apply now. Secondly, have the democrats have the guts to pass reform in the senate where they would get rid of some of the filibuster rules. You have a situation where 40 senators representing potentially 10 of the public can block any kind of legislation. To start with, lets get rid of the rules and the senate that allow a minority to block the rules for the majority. Then they can negotiate as to what they will do. A good start would be to submit the Simpson Bowles report that had all the things and it the republicans are asking for and if he thinks democrats might like, too. Host this is the lead editorial in this mornings washington post. There headline is getting off the cliff. Gerald is on the line for democrats calling from our island. Caller as i looked at the whole situation, icy grave between both parties. There is no compromise at all. I see gray between both parties. Republicans still want to tax the middle class. To me it is a great country. I see a lot of greed it from the American People. I do not have a lot of money. Ill donate 100 to this country to get it back to its feet as an american citizen for what they have done for me. We never give back. If a wealthy person wants to give 100, they can contact me and i will match it with 100. I just see a lot of greed. This is a great country. We have the best country in the world. Lets get our act together and get it back on track again. Host how do you see this coming to an end . Do you think the president and people in congress will go over the cliff . Will they come to a compromise before the end of the year . Caller i think a lot of it is political ploy. It is a political game whether or not they will come to a compromise, i do not know. I do not know if the republicans still have a strong showing. I think most of the middle class will be for cutting taxes for the middle class. How it will come to an end, to be honest with you, i hope the rich people do pay a little bit more. I think they can afford to. They get plenty of benefits from this country. Is an opinion. How will it turn out, i do not know. I think it is a lot of political grandstanding. Host lets go to john from arkansas on the line for republicans. Caller i would like to recommend a simple solution. People hate to do some things because it just goes against their grain. What we should do is the thing the republicans hate the most is raising taxes. The things democrats hate the most is cutting spending. So we task to the republicans to come up with 1. 6 trillion dollars in tax increases or revenue increases. That is their task. They identify where the taxes come from. Rich, poor, middleclass or otherwise. At the same time, you take the Simpson Bowles approach. Everybody has agreed to the approach. 3 and spending cuts to the one in tax increases. That means the democrats would be tasked to find 4. 80 trillion and enter spending cuts. It would have 21 days to identify where they make the cuts. Both of them submit their proposals. Then it is all fixed. Host john in arkansas on the line for republicans. This is how it is reported this morning in net saturdays new york times. Don from new mexico on the line for independence. You are on a the washington journal. What do you think about the fiscal cliff and talks being a still make stalemate . Caller we need to quit hyperventilating. Costco is declaring a 7 dividend on their income this year. What does that mean . It means at the end of this process, the federal government will be bringing in more money to its coffers. The richest one half of 1 of americans will receive 50 of their income from Capital Gains and dividends. Whatever the situation is, at this particular time, the major corporations and the wealthy in this country are taking income and Capital Gains and dividends. Whatever happens, we are going to be bringing more