Focus On Spending News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

We have resolved the revenue issue, and the question is, what are we going to do about spending? i wish the president would lead us in this discussion rather than putting himself in a position of having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the table to discuss the single biggest issue confronting our future. you know, until we adjust the entitlements so that they meet the demographics of our country, we can't ever solve this problem. the time to solve it is now. >> do you, then, agree with the republican leader in the senate, mr. mcconnell, who says we're done now with the taxing side of i...

Attacking them when democrats haven't put out a budget. they refuse to propose any real significant cuts. and they're just sitting there going, we're going to wait for the republicans. taxes have been raised. that card has been taken off the table. >> finally. >> what do democrats do now? >> i think democrats are going to have to, if they want to avert another crisis when we come up to the next cr on the debt ceiling, democrats will have to do that. i agree with you, i think it's irresponsible on reid's part. the president has been much more responsible. the president has met his constitutiona...

Completely in a different direction and brought up a very good point. but back to today, if you look at what happened and you look at where we're going and why we're not talking about spending, it's because the president got rolled on taxes last time around. he got hammered for it. he had no choice but to make this happen the way he did. and quite frankly, boehner, cantor, mcconnell, the most difficult people on the face of the earth is what we've learned by watching the sausages being made. could anyone negotiate with them and get anything done? >> well, actually, yes. >> oh, really? >> joe b...

We have time for a couple of "must-reads." this one's from the "daily news" yesterday. the fiscal grand canyon by andrew samwick, a professor of economics at dartmouth. he was on the council of economic advisers in 2003. he says this, in part. "these are the facts about the budget. everyone knows them. yet the two parties have continued to pursue their dangerously parallel approaches to the debt: democrats pretending that minimal tax increases will spare the middle class -- that spare the middle class can save us, republicans generally pretending that spending cuts that exempt defense and tipt...

That. that was not what the leadership wanted the fight to be about. if it were up to john boehner, that issue would have been gone a long time ago. but what happened was when you got to the very end, and conservatives were not relenting, you had the democrats hammering republicans on that issue, which in the national context, had they shut down the government over that, that would have been crazy politically for republicans. they would have gotten hurt badly by that. so the democrats highlighting that probably helped boehner discard that issue in the end, move it to the side, focus on spendin...