Forbes magazine:
The fiscal cliff is a combination of impending (and automatic) spending cuts and tax hikes scheduled for late 2012/early 2013. The automatic spending cuts were triggered when the “super committee” (I didn’t come up with the name) failed to reach a deficit reduction deal in the wake of last year’s boisterous debt ceiling debate. The cuts reduce projected spending by $1.5 trillion (which is a fair chunk of change) but over ten years (which rather mitigates that a good bit).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larahoffmans/2012...LA Times:
Fears about a looming fiscal crisis at the end of the year are ... threatening to undercut the nation's fragile recovery, a growing number of economists and employers say.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, in testimony Thursday before Congress, repeatedly warned about the so-called fiscal cliff — a reference to the expiration of tax cuts Dec. 31 and the imposition of automatic spending reductions Jan. 1. ...
... several large pieces of temporary legislation are set to end at once, the biggest of which is the Bush tax cuts, estimated at $165 billion.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress remain bitterly divided on those cuts ...
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/07/busin...Christian Science Monitor:
Congress’s most trusted budgetkeepers – the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – warned in a report Tuesday that if Congress does not deal with a raft of fiscal measures by Dec. 31, some $560 billion in drastic budget cuts and tax hikes will result.
On one hand, that would cut the US federal deficit in half. On the other, it “probably” would send the US into recession, the report says. So what is the fiscal cliff and what is Congress doing about it? ...
The fiscal cliff is Washington shorthand for the huge number of significant provisions that will either expire or take effect at midnight on Dec. 31 if Congress does nothing.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/...Huffington Post:
The "fiscal cliff" is the Washington term some clever polemicist dreamed up to denote what happens at the end of 2012: That's when the Bush [t]ax cuts expire. And unless Congress votes otherwise, that's [w]hen the "automatic" across-the-board spending cuts passed during last year's debt ceiling crisis are supposed to take effect.
Newspapers across the country are taking up the cry: Save us from the fiscal cliff! Lawmakers from both parties are pushing for a "Grand Bargain" along the lines of the right-wing Simpson[-]Bowles proposal. ...
Politicians in both parties are following their lead. Many of them are citing a Congressional Budget Office report which says that the "fiscal cliff" will have a disastrous impact on our already-wounded economy. ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/the-fi...
