Natalie Gonnella
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As lawmakers prepare for the latest round of the debt debate tonight at the White House, GOP leaders are standing firm in their objection to tax increases.
House Speaker John Boehner last night backed away from his original $4 trillion proposal due to Democrats' demands, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this morning quickly followed suit.
Showing his support for Boehner's revised $2 trillion deficit reduction package, in an interview today with Fox New Sunday, the Kentucky Senator said that while he still hopes for the biggest deal possible, the President's current plan for tax hikes is simply a "terrible idea":
Unfortunately, as the speaker said, insisting on the White House and congressional and Democrats insisting on really big tax increases as a condition to do anything on the spending side, we believe the president was right back in December when he signed the two-year extension of the current tax rates that raising taxes in the middle of this economic situation we're in is a terrible idea. Let me just look at the unemployment figures last Friday. All the arguments the president used in December still today were today. There's an additional issue addition to unemployment at work here is what kind of government do you want to have?
And if you look back at the last two and a half years, you see the government running banks, insurance companies, car companies, national housing loan business, taken over healthcare, trying to take over the Internet, increasing spending, discretionary spending 24 percent, increasing debt 35 percent. What -- how big a government do we want? And we don't want to use this opportunity presented by the president's request of us to raise the debt ceiling to kind of freeze perpetuity this much government. I don't think the American people want it. I don't think it's good for the economy.
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