Progressive Breakfast: Deadlines Get Nudged Back

Search For Revenue May Affect Health Care Timing

Politico Pulse reports: "Both the House and Senate may delay their summer breaks by a few days in order to get health-care bills off the floor. [1] A House leadership aide: 'If we need to, we’ll go longer.' Ditto from a Senate leadership aide. The House’s 'Summer District Work Period' is scheduled to begin Monday, Aug. 3, and House leaders are hoping to have their final vote Friday, July 31, or – worst case – on Saturday. The Senate was already scheduled to be in D.C. a week longer: Senators’ “State Work Period” is scheduled to begin Aug. 10. The point of expressing flexibility on getaway day is to show leaders are still determined to get the bills done on President Obama’s schedule.

The Treatment's Jonathan Cohn blames the disagreement over paying for reform: [2] "On Wednesday, according to a Capitol Hill source, the Senate Finance Committee distributed to its members a list of about twenty ways to help pay for health care reform ... It might sound like an ordinary and perfectly reasonable thing to do. And it would be--if this exercise were taking place, oh, six weeks ago. But it’s the second week of July. By this point, the Finance Committee was supposed to be holding hearings in order to 'mark up' legislation ... Over on the House side, things are looking a good bit better."

NYT update ends on optimistic note: [3] "Mr. Conrad said Finance Committee members had left an afternoon meeting feeling optimistic after seeing some new cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. 'We have a real range of options on financing,' he said. 'I think people walked out, feeling like, ‘Yeah, we can do this.'"

Senate HELP cmte markup (which doesn't have jurisdiction on financing) on track. CQ: [4] "HELP leaders hope to conclude their markup this week. They began debating the most controversial title of the bill Wednesday, a section that includes proposals to create new government agencies called 'gateways' to help people without insurance find subsidized coverage and to create a government-run insurance plan as one option available to the uninsured."

OMB Director pushes Congress to squeeze more savings out of Medicare and Medicaid: [5] "Orszag delivered a letter to lawmakers during a meeting last night on Capitol Hill amid signs that congressional momentum for overhauling the system is slowing. ... Among other points, he urged lawmakers to include further cuts in the Medicare and Medicaid payments that hospitals receive for treating the uninsured."

Time's Karen Tumulty assesses meeting between Sen. Maj. Leader and group of GOPers: [6] "Reid spokesman Jim Manley said his boss ... told the Republicans that the time for posturing was over; it was now time, he stressed, to make it clear whether they intended to be part of the process of writing a bill, or simply opposing it. 'The message was, 'Are you in or are you out?' Manley said. But where Reid may have thought he was drawing a line in the sand, GOP Senators took away the opposite message — saying they saw signs that the Majority Leader might be flexible on his deadline of passing a bill by the time Congress leaves town for its August recess."

Wonk Room's Igor Volsky analyzes the WH-hospital deal: [7] "The savings are smaller than some progressives would have liked but they are real, perhaps even more so than the pharmaceutical industry’s recent pledge to lower (how, we’re not yet exactly sure) spending on prescription drugs by $80 billion. As the industry itself has admitted the savings are there for health care reform. Combined with additional savings from health care modernization and the additional revenue from an employer mandate, vice taxes, and possible changes to the tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance, the resources for reform are at at least $1.2 trillion. Most importantly, this agreement keeps the hospitals in line and supportive of reform. "

G8 Crafts Delicate Climate Compromise

Globe and Mail: "Leaders of the world's eight foremost industrialized economies have established an aggressive new marker in the battle against climate change: [8] holding the global temperature to a two-degree-Celsius increase. To get there, the leaders agreed that the world's 32 industrialized nations should slash their greenhouse-gas emissions 80 per cent by 2050, though they did not agree on the base year from which the cuts would be made."

TNR's Brad Plumer sizes up the agreement: [9] "The big quagmire, meanwhile, is that the developing world wants to see very deep cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 from the United States, Europe, and other wealthy nations ... the agreement on 2°C is a good sign (the Bush administration had resisted that), but there are plenty of inauspicious signs lurking. No wonder the Obama administration has been trying to branch off from these multilateral forums to see if it can strike bilateral side deals with countries like China. The New York Times reports that European leaders are miffed at this approach, but it's honestly hard to see a better option for breaking the current impasse."

Reid nudges back Senate deadline. ClimateWire: [10] "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has bumped back the deadline until Sept. 28 for the six committees working on a comprehensive climate change and energy bill ... Originally, Reid wanted the Environment and Public Works Committee and other panels that deal with tax, agriculture, energy and foreign relation issues to have their work done by Sept. 18 ... convinced the Nevada Democrat to give the committees a little bit more time ... Reid is still sticking with his plan to get the legislation through the Senate in time for U.N. climate negotiations this December in Copenhagen, Denmark."

Sen. McCaskill further threatens to weaken House bill. Grist's Kate Sheppard [11] "Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) doesn’t think that the climate and energy bill that passed the House last month stands much of a chance in the Senate. And if climate legislation is going to pass the Senate, it would have to have a 'very gradual implementation,' McCaskill told conservative Missouri talk radio host Mike Ferguson on Tuesday. She also said she would not vote for the climate bill that the Senate rejected last year, nor would she vote for the House bill (Waxman-Markey) as it stands ... She said she will probably make those on the left and right angry in this debate, and will be 'working with a group of moderates in the middle' to shape the Senate bill."

MoveOn targets Clear Air provision. Grist: [12] "MoveOn is running full-page ads in D.C.-based publications urging the Senate to maintain the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide. The climate bill passed by the House last month would limit the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act, instituting a new regulatory system instead."

Senate "likely" to drop carbon tariff, according to CQ: [13] "The Senate is likely to overhaul a trade provision that was crucial to winning the support of some Democrats for the House-passed climate change bill ... The tariff in the [House] 'cap and trade' bill would start in 2020. It would affect energy-intensive goods from certain countries that do not make carbon reduction commitments of their own, if the administration found that other U.S. efforts to minimize the impact of the new program on domestic firms had not worked."

Job Losses Spurring Second Stim Talk

NYT surmises the stimulus landscape: [14] "Administration officials acknowledge that their initial forecasts, which anticipated that unemployment would peak at 8.5 percent, were too optimistic, although they were in line with Federal Reserve and most private forecasters. ... The looming political battle is about how to respond, and three camps are forming. The first includes the White House and most Democratic leaders in Congress, who champion a wait-and-see approach until more of the stimulus money hits the streets. White House officials estimate that the government has committed $158 billion for spending around the country, but only about one-third of that has been spent. Temporary tax cuts have totaled about $43 billion thus far, according to White House estimates. A second camp, consisting of nervous Democrats and some economists, argues that the government must spur the economy with another round of spending, tax cuts or a mixture of both. The third camp is led by Republicans, many of whom argue that the spending program was wrong from the start and that the government should focus on tax cuts."

WSJ on starving states: [15] "States plan to use about half of some $8.8 billion in unencumbered stimulus money they will receive to plug budget deficits, underscoring the financial difficulties many are facing ... At least 39 states have responded to declining tax revenue and drained budget reserves by making spending cuts, according to a study by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Some economists at the think tank say such cuts could reduce economic activity and worsen the recession, but that the stimulus money has prevented the cuts from being 'much deeper.'"

G-8 leaders won't prematurely end stimulus, won't necessarily do more. Bloomberg: [16] "Group of Eight leaders said the economic recovery from the steepest recession since World War II was too fragile for them to consider reversing efforts to pump money into the economy ...Divergences over what to do next and calls from developing nations to do more to counter the slump underscored the G-8’s limited room for maneuver ... A G-8 statement yesterday embraced options ranging from the second U.S. stimulus package some lawmakers and economists are advocating to Germany’s emphasis on shifting the focus to deficit reduction."

Smaller-than-planned toxic assets effort launches. McClatchy: [17] "Almost four months after it was first announced, the Treasury Department late Wednesday rolled out a scaled-back version of its long-awaited plan to purchase jointly with the private sector bad mortgage-based assets plaguing the nation's banks ... Although once expected to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, the Treasury Department will invest $30 billion initially, alongside $10 billion from select private sector firms. The program can be expanded quickly if economic conditions deteriorate, regulators said." Simon Johnson in LAT: [18] "This is largely a face-saving announcement. It is inconsequential in terms of whether the banks will have enough capital."