Tax increases?

The presentation put out by Speaker of the House John Boehner for his caucus members has this statement right up front in the seven page document.

"Under the framework, the Joint Committee of Congress will
work off a current-law baseline, as required by the 1974
Budget Act, effectively making it impossible for Joint
Committee to increase taxes."

Translating that into English from Congress - speak, Boehner is telling House Republicans that the special committee tasked to come up with 1.5 trillion in further budget cuts by Thanksgiving will not be able to include tax increases in their recommendations.

At the White House this morning, presidential spokesman Jay Carney was asked about this point. He said that the bill before Congress does not require the Special Committee to use any particular baseline, so there is no reason why the Committee could not suggest tax increases.

To put it mildly, this is a big issue. Is Carney just covering up for Obama so that it does not look like the president caved in totally on the tax issue just to put the next vote on the debt ceiling beyond his re-election bid? Or is Carney correct?

I just read the entire 74 page text of the proposed bill. As a practicing lawyer for over 35 years, I am adept at reading statutes to see exactly what they say. The problem with this one is that much of what it does is to amend other statutes which are not fully set forth. Figuring out exactly what the bill means would take another long slog through a whole host of other provisions of the federal code. In other words, even after carefully reading the bill, I cannot tell whether the Speaker or the president's spokeman is correct on this point.

It is hard to imagine that we have gone through all these weeks and months of nonsense just to get to a point where it is unclear what the effect of the proposed statute will be. Someone is going to have to clarify this quickly or the entire bill may become untenable.