President Obama held a quick press briefing earlier today (guess we were all listening to the Murdoch drama) to provide an update on progress towards a debt deal:
The National Journal provides the five page outline of the Gang of Six deal. And it is a Gang of Six again, since Coburn has joined back up. President Obama specifically singled this effort out for some praise in his briefing, and a couple of the articles I’ve read say that this has significant support in the Senate. It is hard to see how this gets through the House.
The outline provided has little in the way of detail and promises alot of work by various committees to actually come up with cuts or revenue enhancements in the areas discussed. They call for increased tax revenues of $1 billion, but they also claim that the CBO would find their plan provides tax cuts to the tune of $1.5 trillion. It also has this bullet point:
Reform, not eliminate, tax expenditures for health, charitable giving, homeownership,and retirement, and retain support for low-income workers and families.
There’s a framework for Social Security reform, but only if they can get the Debt Reduction actions done.
There’s not enough here to say much about this — other than this looks like a five page framework to kick the can down the road again. This does — pretty clearly — count on the Congress to do its job re: the pursestrings.