Nothing is quite so exciting as a lame duck Congress. And I mean that in the most snarky, sarcastic, rolling of my eyes kind of way.
For the next month and a half (okay, a month on account of the holidays), expect to be bombarded by lots of reports about what could happen. Here’s what will happen: an AMT patch and some half-hearted concessions on tax cuts.
The Democrats are acutely aware that they don’t have the votes to do anything significant, such as permanent repeal of the tax cuts, next year, so I doubt/hope they will waste our time trying to push anything like that through. The GOP doesn’t have the votes now to hold any particular position to the fire but they do have quite a bit of leverage in the next session. So what to do?
President Obama’s Senior Advisor David Axelrod dropped a huge hint over the weekend when he said that the President objected to “permanent” tax cuts for those at the top but refused to say anything about the short term. That leads many, myself included, to believe that the inevitable compromise on this will be a one to three year extension of the Bush tax cuts. Keep reading this space for updates.
