Jeffrey Applegate News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Cliff, end quote. Heres what he was describing on january 1, 2013, tax breaks worth 416 billion will expire. Spending on things like defense, medicare payments to doctors will be slashed by 65 billion. Add it all up and you are talking about cutting roughly half a trillion dollars from the federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office and others warn going over the cliff will send the economy into a recession in the first half of next year. It was congress and the white house that set the deadline in hopes of forcing each other to cut the federal budget deficit and begin to address the growing national debt. Of the half trillion dollars the fiscal cliff is designed to cut in red ink next year, 80 of it comes in the form of higher taxes. Under current law, 20 comes from lowering government spending. This is just the first step as part of a 7 trillion effort to cut the debt over the next decade. That has led some to describe what could be coming as a fiscal slope, not a cliff. Whatever

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