Budget fight in D.C. going down to wire

Jockeying but no deal yet on sidestepping ‘fiscal cliff’

— Senate leaders and their aides began searching Saturday for a formula to extend tax cuts for most Americans that could win bipartisan support in the Senate and final approval in the divided House by the new year, hoping to prevent tax increases and budget cuts that could threaten the fragile economy.

As part of the last-minute negotiations, the lawmakers were haggling over unemployment benefits, cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, taxes on large inheritances and how to limit the effect of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that is intended to ensure that top earners pay a fair share but that is increasingly encroaching on the middle class.

President Barack Obama said that if talks between the Senate leaders break down, he wanted the Senate to call an up-or-down vote on a narrower measure that would extend only the middle-class tax breaks and unemployment benefits. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said he would schedule such a vote on Monday absent another deal.

If Congress is unable to act before the new year, Washington will have effectively ushered in a series of automatic tax increases and a program of drastic spend- ing cuts that economists say could pitch the country back into recession.

The president and lawmakers put those spending cuts and tax increases in place this year as draconian incentives that would force them to confront the nation’s growing debt.

Now, lawmakers are doing everything they can to keep them from happening, though it seemed likely Saturday that the cuts, known as sequestration, would be left to the next Congress, which will be sworn in this week.

“We just can’t afford a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly address. “The housing market is healing, but that could stall if folks are seeing smaller paychecks. The unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 2008, but already, families and businesses are starting to hold back because of the dysfunction they see in Washington.”

Senate Republicans said they were ready to compromise.

“Divided government is a good time to solve hard problems — and in the next few days, leaders in Washington have an important responsibility to work together and do just that,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, delivering his party’s weekly address.

Blunt said “inaction shouldn’t be an option.”

However, the president’s plan “would only fund the government for eight days,” he said. “What does the president propose we do for the other 357 days of the year?”

The fear of another painful economic slowdown appears to have accelerated deal-making on Capitol Hill with just 48 hours left before the “fiscal cliff” arrives. Weeks of public sniping between Reid, the Democratic leader, and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ebbed on Friday evening with pledges of cooperation and optimism from both.

On Saturday, though, that sentiment was put to the test as 98 senators waited for word on whether their leaders had come up with a proposal that might be acceptable to members of both parties. The first votes in the Senate, if needed, are scheduled for this afternoon.

“It’s a little like playing Russian roulette with the economy,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. “The consequences could be enormous.”

Members of Congress were mostly absent from the Capitol on Saturday, after two days of Senate votes on other matters and a day before both chambers were to reconvene. House members were scheduled to return from their districts. However, senior aides were working on proposals in their offices or at their homes.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, stopped by the Capitol briefly to see his chief of staff Saturday afternoon. McConnell spent much of the day in his office.

Aides to Reid were expecting to receive offers from Mc-Connell’s staff, but no progress was reported by midday. Even if the talks were to take a positive turn, Senate aides said, no announcement was expected before the leaders briefed their caucuses today.

The chief sticking point among lawmakers and the president continued to be how to set tax rates for the next decade and beyond. Obama and Democrats have said they want tax rates to rise on incomes of more than $250,000 a year, while Republicans want a higher threshold, perhaps at $400,000.

Democrats and Republicans are also divided on the tax on inherited estates, which currently hits inheritances of more than $5 million at 35 percent.

On Tuesday, it is scheduled to rise to 55 percent beginning with inheritances exceeding $1 million.

Senate Republicans, including John Cornyn of Texas, said they were resigned to their inability to prevent higher tax rates for some top earners.

“We have to bow to the inevitable, which is we are in the minority in the Senate, and that’s likely to happen no matter what we do,” Cornyn said in an interview.

If Congress doesn’t act, taxes could rise by more than $3,400 per household, automatic spending cuts would start taking effect and expanded unemployment benefits would lapse. If there is no resolution, the economy would likely go into recession in the first half of 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Immediately — regardless of whether Congress and Obama reach a deal — every working American’s taxes will go up because neither party is fighting to extend a Social Security payroll-tax cut that has been in place for two years.

But failure to reach a broader deal on taxes and spending would increase taxes even further, returning rates to Clinton-era levels. January paychecks would shrink as employers start withholding more for taxes.

Many families would also suffer if Congress fails to extend emergency jobless benefits, meaning that 2.1 million Americans would abruptly stop receiving expected payments.

“There’s going to be a hit to people who don’t have much capacity to absorb a hit,” said Christine Owens of the National Employment Law Project. “A lot of families are going to be in a bad place, not being able to pay their rent, or their mortgage, or their bills.”

In short order, such changes are expected to dampen consumer confidence and spending, with potentially grave consequences for an economy already struggling to recover momentum.

“Every day that goes by is this needless self-flagellation,” said Stuart Hoffman, the chief economist of PNC Financial Services Group, who estimated that the tax increases and loss of unemployment benefits would reduce take-home pay by $9 billion a week.

The fallout is expected to continue to worsen if the inaction and stalemate continue.

Tens of millions of families stand to be ensnared by the alternative minimum tax, increasing their 2012 tax bill and potentially throwing the coming tax season into disarray. This month the Internal Revenue Service warned that as many as 100 million filers — out of 150 million — could be affected. Analysts said the IRS might have to delay the start of filing season and the delivery of expected refund checks.

Again, the lowest-income families are expected to be hit the hardest. “Those early filers, 95 percent of them are expecting a healthy refund early in the year,” said Mark Steber, the chief tax officer of Jackson Hewitt.

Come mid-January, some Medicare patients also might struggle to find doctors to treat them. Without congressional action, doctors would face two cuts to reimbursement rates: a 26.5 percent reduction in Medicare payment rates from a 1997 law, and a further 2 percent cut adopted to reduce the deficit last year.

“I feel I am being held hostage,” said Lee Rovik, a 70-year-old Medicare beneficiary in Camdenton, Mo. A sign at his doctor’s office warns that it might have to close if Congress does not fix the Medicare payment formula.

“Politicians don’t give a damn about me or the doctor,” Rovik said. “If the clinic goes out of business, which is entirely possible, where will we go?”

By late February or early March, lawmakers would face another economic showdown over raising the nation’s borrowing limit again to avoid a cash-management crisis and a government shutdown. Republicans have already said they intend to use congressional authority to increase the so-called debt ceiling to extract cuts from entitlement programs — a threat Obama has said he will resist.

Around the same time in early spring, the government and its workers would begin feeling the full effects of cuts to defense and domestic spending.

Without a compromise, the Pentagon and its civilian contractors would face steep reductions in virtually every program. Military officials said those spending reductions — $500 billion over 10 years — would eventually force the cancellation or shrinking of projects, and large-scale layoffs of military and civilian personnel.

Hundreds of other federal programs would see cuts, beginning in late January and continuing through the year. These include reductions of about 8 percent in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and rental housing assistance.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear, Annie Lowrey, Robert Pear and Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times; by Richard Rubin, Margaret Talev, Roxana Tiron, James Rowley, Heidi Przybyla, Kathleen Hunter, Hans Nichols and Brendan McGarry of Bloomberg News; and by David Espo, Jim Kuhnhenn of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/30/2012

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