http://my.earthlink.net/article/us?g...8-18b1179856e7

The GOP proposal itself revives a host of ideas from failed talks with Obama in the summer of 2011. Then, Obama was willing to discuss politically risky ideas such as raising the eligibility age for Medicare, implementing a new inflation adjustment for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments and requiring wealthier Medicare recipients to pay more for their benefits.

Monday's Republican plan contains few specific and anticipates that myriad details will have to be filled in next year in legislation overhauling the tax code and curbing the growth of benefit programs.

Tine is growing shorter before the deadline to avert the fiscal cliff, which is a combination of expiring Bush-era tax cuts and automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that are the result of prior failures of Congress and Obama to make a budget deal.

Many economists say such a one-two punch could send the fragile economy back into recession.

GOP aides said their plan is based on one presented by Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of a deficit commission Obama appointed earlier in his term, in testimony to a special deficit "supercommittee" last year — in effect a milder version of a 2010 Bowles proposal that caused both GOP and Democratic leaders in Congress to recoil.

Unlike Bowles' official 2010 plan, drafted with former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson, the version released Monday drops the earlier endorsement of Obama's proposal to increase tax rates on family income exceeding $250,000 back to Clinton-era levels, with the top rate jumping from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Bowles, in a statement, said he was flattered but the GOP plan does not represent his proposal.

Still, he added, "Every offer put forward brings us closer to a deal, but to reach an agreement, it will be necessary for both sides to move beyond their opening positions."

By GOP math, their plan would produce $2.2 trillion in budget savings over the coming decade: $800 billion in higher taxes, $600 billion in savings from costly health care programs like Medicare, $300 billion from other proposals such as forcing federal workers to contribute more toward their pensions and $300 billion in additional savings from the Pentagon budget and domestic programs funded by Congress each year.

Boehner signaled in discussions with Obama in 2011 that he was willing to accept up to $800 billion in higher tax revenues, but his aides maintained that much of that money would have come from so-called dynamic scoring — a conservative approach in which economic growth would have accounted for much of the revenue. Now, Boehner is willing to accept the estimates of official scorekeepers like the Congressional Budget Office, whose models reject dynamic scoring.
Naturally neither side is really offering specifics on how much and exactly where they would make cuts. And as for the figures, also remember that they are talking about over ten years (and likely any real plan would put the bulk of any cuts to the end of the ten years so they would have plenty of time to undo them before they could come into effect).

That $300 billion defense savings for example would actually be $30 billion a year from their $700 billion a year budget and how much of that are they figuring to come from lower costs when Afghinstan is mostly shut down in 2014? . I agree with some of the suggestions such as raising the age for Medicare (that would be phased in over time -would not reduce the current budget at all but might help in future years).

Closing tax loopholes and deductions? $800 billion over ten years would be again $80 billion a year- current estimates are that deductions save taxpayers over $1 trillion a year so not much change in them either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...reak-by-break/
The U.S. government gives away more than $1 trillion a year in tax breaks — subsidies for individuals and companies that are often substitutes for direct government spending.
Once written into the tax code, they tend to stick around.
Let's say that Boehner's plan was passed and the numbers panned out. THat would save $220 billion a year and just barely reduce the deficit to below $1 trillion. If that stayed fixed, it would "only" add $9 trillion more to the US debt in that time.