The largest issue confronting the United States in the immediate and long-term is debt. The largest drivers of that debt are entitlements, especially Medicare, whose growth outpaces both that of the economy and of government revenues.
This is the "fiscal cliff" the republic faces, not the putative one being discussed currently.
The president is ignoring this. His proposal to raise taxes four percentage points on a minuscule segment of the tax-base will tackle our debt level in the same way a fat guy tackles his weight problem by getting a haircut. It is not an attempt to reduce the debt crisis. It is either political posturing, an attempt to impose some abstract notion of redistributive fairness on the wealthy, or some sort of amalgamation of the two.
Speaker Boehner is not going to get any meaningful reform of entitlements here because President Obama is making clear -- in deed, not word -- that he has no interest in pursuing meaningful reform. He and the Left will continue to "defend" entitlements until they collapse under their own weight.
The best the House GOP can do is to trade some insignificant hikes on an even smaller portion of the tax base than the president originally proposed in exchange for minor spending reductions and minor adjustments to the growth of Social Security and Medicare. These may not be a lot, but unlike the president's tax proposals, they are not nothing either. As Avik Roy argues, it is well past time that Republicans start "making small changes to entitlements today that pay big dividends in future decades."
Get some important concessions, make a little progress, and do not diminish your ability to make some more progress on another day.
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