President Barack Obama addressed the nation for the first time today to start dealing with the upcoming 'fiscal cliff" that the country will fall off on New Years Eve.
According to projections, if the government does not act, the U.S. economy will slide back into a recession with the unemployment rate skyrocketing to over nine percent by next fall.
The president said he has invited leaders of both parties to the White House next week to start to build consensus around the issues facing the nation's economy.
"Our work is made that much more urgent because at the end of this year we face a series of deadlines that require us to make major decisions about how to pay our deficit down, decisions that will have a huge impact on both the economy and the middle class, both now and in the future," the president said in the White House East Room. "If we're serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue. And that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes."
The president stressed that if "Congress fails to come to an agreement on an overall deficit-reduction package by the end of the year, everybody's taxes will automatically go up on January 1st -- everybody's -- including the 98 percent of Americans who make less than $250,000 a year."
House Speaker John A. Boehner said it is important to avert the fiscal cliff.
"It's why the House took action earlier this year to replace the sequester with other types of cuts, and it's also why over the summer we passed a bill to extend all of the current tax rates for one year so that we had time to overhaul our tax code," he said. "And it's why I outlined a responsible path forward where we can replace the spending cuts and extend the current rates, paving the way for entitlement reform, as well as tax reform, with lower rates."
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