Unlike the Grand Bargain the Kyl Amendment offers real incentives to systemic democratic and free market reform.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Help With Soviet Conversion Is Risky
The grand bargain in Europe has been a stronger, more encompassing welfare state alongside higher taxes on everyone.
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But the -- (laughter) -- obviously a portion of the grand bargain will have been acted on already -- the upfront, the initial spending cuts.
And then on the grand bargain real quick, you had said that -- even today and also last week -- that this is easily solvable.
And there was a role played in the failure of those discussions, the failure of Simpson-Bowles and the failure of the grand bargain talks, by the guy who's now running for vice president.
Gaffney presented this view in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee this morning in the company of Dr. Graham Allison, one of the authors of the Grand Bargain, and Arnold Horelick of the Rand Corporation.
The grand bargain is a different matter.
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Not everything that could have been achieved -- not the grand bargain that the President and the Speaker were seeking -- but passed legislation to ensure that we had significant deficit reduction of a trillion dollars and set up a process for even more.
By Monday, the grand bargain was dead, House Republicans and Senate Democrats were scrambling to put together rival bills, and all the available options for resolving the debt ceiling increase would have negative impacts directly for the US economy, and indirectly on the global economy.
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The looming sequester, which would slash spending across the government, was created by both parties, after the failure of the Grand Bargain, in 2011, as a purposely odious policy, in order to force the two sides to reach a more rational plan to reduce long-term deficits.
Therefore, we are pursuing, as well -- even as we pursue the bigger prize, we are working with Congress to ensure that there is a mechanism by which we simply raise the debt ceiling, or raise the debt ceiling and do something much smaller than the grand bargain.
And his central proposal, if you will, in the discussions with the Speaker of the House and the grand bargain negotiations was that this -- if we do this we will both come under pressure within our own parties, but together we will have accomplished something significant that will be worth doing, will have been worth doing.
Just as the cable television newsmen were bemoaning the unwillingness of the Republicans to compromise, Boehner came forward to suggest strongly that the Grand Bargain was a very real possibility since his Republicans in Congress would now be willing to accept some tax increases to produce revenues to balance off the reductions in spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
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That leaves one, rather distant, hope: that, in the lame-duck period between the election and the next Congress, prompted by the imminent expiry of George Bush's tax cuts at the beginning of 2013, America's politicians will sit down and finally hammer out the grand bargain the country so desperately needs, with the tax increases delayed in exchange for sensible reforms to spending and the tax code.
And, unfortunately, throughout that process, whenever the possibility of a grand bargain seemed in the offing, a grand bargain that had to be balanced in nature -- because every bipartisan group that looked at this and every reasonable economist who looked at this agreed that a solution had to be balanced in nature.
In his late night remarks following the House passage of the bill, Obama lamented that this bill was not the "grand bargain" the country needed to meaningfully raise revenue, cut spending and focus sensibly on growth.
So the grand bilateral bargain that the Dear Leader has long wanted aid, full recognition and security guarantees in return for giving up his box of nuclear tricks remains as remote as ever.
There is a large section of the American right, indeed of the American people, which does not accept the grand central bargain of post-war politics across the other side of the Atlantic.
It appears that just such initiatives are envisioned as early components of the "Grand Bargain" proposal.
It has been detailed in bipartisan plans from the Bowles-Simpson commission to the Rivlin-Domenici commission to the Gang of Six and the outlines of the "grand bargain" that was almost achieved by President Obama and Boehner.
At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the "grand bargain" House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.
And some around President Bush seem to believe that the "new strategic framework" he has called for really should look a lot like the old "Grand Bargain" sought by the Clinton-Gore administration: a deal that would package deep reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic arms with an allowance for the U.S. to deploy a missile defense of such limited capability as to be largely ineffectual.
But arguably the biggest social and political risk is the potential collapse of the so-called grand bargain between the ruling classes and the middle classes.
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Yet one of the first foreign policy initiatives promised by the incoming Obama administration is to attempt to diplomatically engage Iran with the aim of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs.
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We certainly saw that during the debt ceiling crisis, where the President was willing to make some political -- some tough choices that would have been challenges for him within his own party in the effort to get a grand bargain with the Speaker of the House.
Say this much for the Obama-GOP Grand Bargain: It leaves the tax rate on dividend income alone, at least for two more years.
There is now a foundation upon which we can build to get something even bigger, and in fact something very significant, the so-called grand bargain, if everyone at the table is willing to take the plunge, essentially, and to lead, and to compromise.
In 1998, the mullahs offered a "grand bargain" to the Clinton administration as a means of averting U.S. retaliation for the Iranian-sponsored killing of 19 American soldiers in an attack in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.
As with so many of the features of "Grand Bargain" style plans for assisting the USSR, aid for defense conversion has considerable potential to make matters worse, not better.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Help With Soviet Conversion Is Risky
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