Dollar for dollar

Dollar for Dollar

by digby

Pelosi lines out the strategy: give the Republicans the entire 2.4 trillion in cuts they asked for now and agree to tackle taxes and entitlements down the road.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi acknowledged Friday that Democrats may reluctantly accept a last-minute compromise to raise the debt limit that involves up to $2.5 trillion in spending cuts, without any agreed-upon plan for new tax revenues.

The plan would place a firewall between entitlement spending and the threat of default, upsetting GOP plans to force deep cuts to those programs. And if, as a result, the GOP declined the offer, Democrats would agree to punt the questions of entitlement spending and tax cuts to a future, streamlined legislative process.

The potential endgame, Pelosi said, would meet an arbitrary GOP requirement that Congress only grant President Obama as much borrowing authority as he’s willing to accept in spending cuts, and leave for a later date a twinned fight over revenues and social insurance programs.

“We’re willing to bite the bullet and make serious cuts in discretionary spending,” Pelosi told a small group of reporters and bloggers.

And the interest saved on that can take us to like a trillion and a half dollars saved. We could go even further with non-health mandatories, could take us almost to two trillion. We could use the offshore — the Overseas Contingency [the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] — could take us to two-and-a-half trillion dollars. Which is the dollar-for-dollar for the lifting the debt ceiling.

I don’t think we have to have dollar-for-dollar, but for those who think they do, there’s a path to get there.

That’s not a great deal for Democrats, she noted, but it protects key programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “[T]hat’s a non-revenue path. I don’t like it at all but it doesn’t go near our entitlements,” Pelosi said.

There’s one big problem: “I don’t think the Republicans are going to accept that. So whatever they would want to accept over-and-above that would have to be something, I think, down the road. And that would be treating entitlements and revenue.”

Apparently, Obama and Boehner are still working on a Big(ger) Deal but this sounds very much like exactly what John Boehner was looking for back in May:

Published: May 9, 2011

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner said Monday that Republicans would insist on trillions of dollars in federal spending cuts in exchange for their support of an increase in the federal debt limit sought by the Obama administration to prevent a government default later this year.
Related

In his most specific statement to date on what Republicans will demand in the debt ceiling fight, Mr. Boehner told the Economic Club of New York that the level of spending reductions should exceed the amount of the increase in borrowing power.

“Without significant spending cuts and changes to the way we spend the American people’s money, there will be no debt limit increase,” Mr. Boehner told members of New York’s business and finance community. “And cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given.” Mr. Boehner said those cuts should be in the trillions of dollars, not billions.

Now that the president has introduced SS and Medicare into the mix, instead of getting a higher dollar figure than the 2.4, he may be getting something even better: some kind of fail-safe “entitlement/tax reform” up or down vote based on Simpson/Bowles . (I doubt he ever dreamed that the President would put SS on the table.)