President Obama and congressional leaders were facing a rapidly shrinking set of options for averting the fiscal crisis as they prepared to meet Friday afternoon, with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warning they are "running out of time."

Just a few weeks ago, lawmakers had high hopes for a "grand bargain" that would narrow the deficit, overhaul the tax code and set the country on a course to curb its entitlement spending -- all while averting massive tax hikes and spending cuts set to hit Jan. 1.

Having squandered that time, lawmakers -- and taxpayers -- will now be lucky if they can just avert the tax hikes.

At the meeting Friday afternoon, Obama was expected to pitch a "Plan C" that's essentially a version of the scaled-back proposal he floated a week ago before leaving for Hawaii.

"...the budget that [Rep. Paul Ryan] came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion. ... The president came out with his own plan and the president, as you remember, came out with a budget, and I don't think anybody took that budget very seriously."

-- Erskine Bowles, Democratic co-chairman of President Obama's debt and deficit commission, in a Sept. 8, 2011 speech at the University of North Carolina.

President Obama and Vice President Biden have been escalating their attacks in the days since soon-to-be Republican nominee Mitt Romney tapped Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to be his wingman. But not in the way everyone expected.

Suggesting Republicans want to enslave people and reverting to a 29-year-old charge that Romney was unkind to his dog isn't where the Democratic debate was supposed to be today.

The federal government ran a $60 billion deficit in June and is already more than $900 billion in the red this fiscal year, but there is some bright news: basic government spending appears to be dropping, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday.

CBO said the government has paid out $2.7 trillion so far in fiscal year 2012, about the same level as it had by this point in fiscal year 2011. But when technical adjustments from the 2008 Wall Street bailout are subtracted, spending has actually dropped 2 percent.

That news comes after a year and a half of fierce battles between Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have fought for deeper spending cuts, and President Obama, who has fought for more money for his priorities.

CBO said Medicaid, education and unemployment benefit spending are both down significantly, chiefly because Mr. Obama's stimulus has winded down and its higher spending levels are expiring. Defense spending is also down in 2012...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made the following statement Thursday following the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Obama administration's health care law.

"As you might imagine, I disagree with the Supreme Court's decision and I agree with the dissent. What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States. And that is I will act to repeal ObamaCare.

Let's make clear that we understand what the court did and did not do. What the court did today was say that ObamaCare does not violate the Constitution. What they did not do was say that ObamaCare is good law or that it's good policy. ObamaCare was bad policy yesterday. It's bad policy today. ObamaCare was bad law yesterday. It's bad law today.

Let me tell you why I say that. ObamaCare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion.

WASHINGTON – Republicans have pushed an election-year $3.5 trillion budget through a divided House that showcases their plans for trimming federal deficits and contrasts sharply with how President Barack Obama and Democrats would tackle the nation's fiscal problems.

The GOP package would revamp Medicare, slice everything from food stamps to transportation and reject Obama's call for higher taxes on the rich. It envisions collapsing the six different income tax rates into just two, with a top rate of 25 percent compared with today's 35 percent. It would also eliminate unspecified tax breaks...

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a wish list, not a to-do list.

President Barack Obama laid out an array of plans in his State of the Union speech as if his hands weren’t so tied by political realities. There can be little more than wishful thinking behind his call to end oil industry subsidies — something he could not get through a Democratic Congress, much less today’s divided Congress, much less in this election year.

And there was more recycling, in an even more forbidding climate than when the ideas were new: He pushed for an immigration overhaul that he couldn’t get past Democrats, permanent college tuition tax credits that he asked for a year ago, and familiar discouragements for companies that move overseas.

A look at Obama’s rhetoric Tuesday night and how it fits with the facts and political circumstances...

Colorodo Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn is skipping Tuesday night's State of the Union speech in a protest of President Obama's policies over so-called recess appointments, rejection of the Keystone pipeline, deficit spending and "draconian" cuts to the defense budget that were negotiated in the debt ceiling deal last summer.

The three-term lawmaker said he has never passed on a presidential address to a joint session of Congress, but this year’s speech is different because President Obama is "in full campaign mode and will use the address as an opportunity to bash his political opponents"...

WASHINGTON -- Any extension of this year's payroll tax cut must be paid for with savings from elsewhere in the budget, House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday.

Boehner's comment meant that House and Senate Republicans are united in demanding that any eventual measure, which could cost over $100 billion, not add to the federal deficit. It also suggested that President Obama and Congress would have to find mutually acceptable savings before any extension could become law.

The current tax cut expires Jan. 1.

Republicans have previously expressed a willingness to try compromising with Obama on ways to create jobs, including renewing the payroll tax cut. But Boehner stopped short of predicting that the two sides will reach agreement on extending this year's 2 percent reduction in the 6.2 percent payroll tax that workers pay or enlarging it, as Obama and many Democrats want.

(CNSNews.com) - As the deadline draws near for the joint congressional supercommittee to reach an agreement on reducing the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade or face automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion, an analysis showed that even if the automatic spending cuts go into effect, real federal spending will still actually increase.

The so-called "supercommittee" did not reach an agreement on Nov. 21, practically opening the door for the automatic cuts.

But it may be irrelevant, according to Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

She analyzed data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and showed that, with or without the automatic cuts, federal government spending would still increase by $1.6 trillion between fiscal years 2013 and 2021.

“It’s totally meaningless,” said de Rugy in reference to the supercommittee’s deliberations. “It’s much ado about nothing.”

The Budget Control Act, passed on Aug.

He's not on the Super Committee - he's not even a member of Congress - but Grover Norquist wants you to know that it's not his fault if the Super Committee fails.

The deficit-reduction committee is likely to announce Monday that they've failed to produce an economic plan before this week's deadline, largely because the Republican and Democrat members disagree on whether or not to raise revenues as part of the solution.

Norquist, who heads the conservative think-tank Americans for Tax Reform, has, over several years, gotten almost every Republican member of Congress to sign a pledge promising to never vote to raise taxes. Some Democratic members of the Super Committee are now blaming that pledge for the gridlock between the two parties over the tax issue.

"One of the problems has been a pledge that too many Republicans took to a Republican wealthy lobbyist by the name of Grover Norquist," Super Committee member Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, told CNN.