Congress’s 12-member deficit-cutting super committee should raise taxes, President Barack Obama said during a press conference on a Hawaiian beach Sunday evening.
“There aren’t any magic beans that you throw on the ground and money grows on trees — you’ve got to do the responsible thing,” he told reporters at the event, which was held at the close of the Pacific-wide APEC trade meeting.
However, he declined to promise that he would veto any committee deal that does not raise taxes.
In Washington, Democratic and Republican negotiators on the 12-member deficit-cutting “super committee” say their panel seems to be deadlocked.
The six Democrats want to raise taxes and boost spending, while promising spending curbs in the future.
The Republicans want to trim the 10-year deficit, and some will accept increased government revenues if there’s a larger economy-boosting revision of the tax-code.
A majority of the committee is slated to devise a plan that nicks $1.2 trillion from the projected 10-year accumulated deficit of roughly $9 trillion.
The 2010 and 2011 deficits were each $1.3 trillion, or roughly 40 percent of the federal government’s annual budget.
The panel’s deadline is November 23. The panel was created by the August deal to raise the federal debt ceiling.
If the panel fails to strike a deal, and Congress fails to approve that deal by December 23, then Congress is supposed to cut roughly $600 billion from future defense spending over the next 10 years, and another $600 billion from various entitlement and other programs.
At the beach press conference, however, Obama insisted on tax increases, saying they were part of the August budget deal.
“My hope is that over the next several days, the congressional leadership on the super-committee will go ahead and bite the bullet and do what needs to be done, because the [budget] math wont change,” he said.
“If you want a balanced approach that doesn’t gut Medicare and Medicaid, doesn’t prevent us from making investments in education and basic science and research … then prudent cuts have to matched up with [new tax] revenue,” he said.
The tax increases, he said, should first be applied to the wealthy. “If we’ve got to raise money, it makes sense for us to start by asking the wealthiest among us to pay a little more, before we start asking seniors to pay a lot more for Medicare,” he said.
