Republicans Pledge New Standoff on Debt Limit

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday set the stage for a bruising election-year showdown on fiscal policy, vowing to hold up another increase in the federal debt ceiling unless it was offset by larger spending cuts.

His combative comments came on the same day the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, hit President Obama hard on his fiscal stewardship in a speech in Des Moines, suggesting that Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans see an opening to attack the president on the mounting federal debt and the size of the federal government. Mr. Boehner’s stance threatened to throw Congress back into the debt-limit stalemate that consumed Washington in 2011, but this time at the height of a campaign that Republicans are trying to make a referendum on Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Mr. Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

The Boehner comments, made at a fiscal summit meeting in Washington, were the first public shot in what promises to be the most consequential budget fight in a generation. On Jan. 1, nearly $8 trillion in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

Mr. Boehner said he would not allow Congress to duck tough decisions with another round of short-term measures. In his address, Mr. Boehner also said the House would pass an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts well before the November election, and he urged lawmakers both in parties to reach a long-term deal on spending and tax changes to head off a fiscal calamity.

“To get on the path to prosperity, we have to avoid the fiscal cliff, but we need to start today,” he said.

Democrats immediately accused Mr. Boehner of once again holding the nation’s full faith and credit hostage to his conservative political agenda, even as Republicans cut corners on the deal struck last summer to end the last debt-ceiling crisis.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, speaking at the same meeting sponsored by the financier Peter G. Peterson, said the government could bump into its borrowing limit before the end of the year, but, he said, the Treasury has enough “tools” to keep the government afloat into early next year. That should push a debt-ceiling showdown well past the November election.

Mr. Geithner appealed to lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling “this time without the drama and the pain and damage that caused the country last July.” And he said an orderly solution could be reached to avert fiscal disaster.

“Our objective should be to replace that very large set of expiring tax provisions and broad-based, automatic, pretty crude spending cuts with a more responsible, balanced glide path to fiscal sustainability,” he said.

Next year’s fiscal crisis has been brewing since early last decade, when successive Republican Congresses used budget rules to pass large but temporary tax cuts that could not be filibustered. The tax cuts expire en masse at the end of this year after Mr. Obama and Republican leaders agreed on a two-year extension. But the president has vowed not to extend the tax cuts for upper-income families again. Regardless of the election results, he will still be in the White House on Jan. 1.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “The American people are tired of kicking things down the road. We’ve got to get this done and done the right way.”

Top aides to Mr. Romney declined to say whether the campaign planned his speech to coincide with Mr. Boehner’s. But as Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign merges its operations more fully with the Republican establishment in Washington, the messages are becoming more similar. Republicans also have indicated they were eager to shift the discussion from social topics like same-sex marriage back to economic issues, which they believe play more to their advantage.

“The Obama campaign wants everybody to be distracted by shiny objects,” said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director. “He promised he would cut the debt and he has not done that.” Aides to Mr. Romney said they picked Iowa for his speech because its citizens have the lowest credit card debt in the country.

The exchange on fiscal policy came on the eve of a Senate budget showdown engineered by Republicans using an obscure procedural provision that says any senator can bring forward a budget if the Budget Committee fails to produce one by April 1.

The main objective of the Republicans is to embarrass the president by forcing the Senate to vote on his budget, which may not get a single vote. That is not because no one supports his plan, but because a presidential budget — which finances the government line by line, agency by agency — is much more detailed than a Congressional budget, which creates a broad outline for spending and taxes to be filled in later by the committees of jurisdiction. Accepting a presidential budget in its totality would be tantamount to ceding Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.

But Republicans have not been able to unify around an alternative. Instead, they will bring forward four different budgets — with a budget passed by House Republicans viewed as the most liberal of the lot. A budget by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy, cut the National Park Service by 30 percent and NASA by a quarter, and end Medicare in 2014. Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposes a budget that would raise the retirement age to 68, cut the size of government in half over 25 years, and end the payroll tax as well as all taxes on savings and investment, and replace them with a 25 percent flat tax.

“These are not serious in nature,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “These are all just for show.” Senate Democrats have not moved forward on a budget in large part because Democratic leaders did not want to highlight internal divisions over spending and taxes or subject senators facing tough re-elections to the difficult votes Republicans would force on a budget.

By http://www.nytimes.com

Scientists hunt ways to fight Alzheimer’s earlier

A fundamental shift is underway in how scientists look for ways to ward off the devastation of Alzheimer’s disease — by testing possible therapies in people who don’t show many symptoms, before too much of the brain is destroyed.

The most ambitious attempt is an international study announced Tuesday that will track whether an experimental drug can stall the disease in people who appear healthy but are genetically destined to get a type of Alzheimer’s that runs in the family. If so, it would be promising evidence that maybe regular Alzheimer’s is preventable, too.

A second study will test whether a nasal spray that sends insulin to the brain helps people with very early memory problems, based on separate research linking diabetes to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

The new focus emerges as the Obama administration adopts the first national strategy to fight the growing Alzheimer’s epidemic — a plan to have effective treatments by 2025.

“We are at an exceptional moment,” with more important discoveries about Alzheimer’s in the last few months than in recent years, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Tuesday.

But a meeting of the world’s top Alzheimer’s scientists this week made clear that meeting the 2025 deadline will require developing a mix of treatments to attack the different ways that Alzheimer’s damages the brain — much like it can take a cocktail of drugs to treat high blood pressure or the AIDS virus.

Perhaps more important, it will require testing possible drugs before full-blown Alzheimer’s sets in, when it may be too late to do much. After all, Alzheimer’s starts ravaging the brain at least a decade before memory problems occur. And doctors don’t wait until the worst symptoms appear before treating heart disease, cancer or diabetes, noted Reisa Sperling of Harvard Medical School.

“Once the train leaves the station of degeneration, it might be too late to stop it,” Sperling said. “We need to define the critical window for intervention.”

Already, 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementia. Barring a research breakthrough, those numbers will rise by 2050, when up to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s.

There is no cure for the disease, and the five medications available to treat it only temporarily ease some symptoms. Finding better ones has been a disappointing slog: Over the past decade, 10 drugs that initially seemed promising failed in late-stage testing, Sperling said.

Moreover, scientists still don’t know exactly what causes Alzheimer’s. The chief suspects are a sticky gunk called beta-amalyoid, which makes up the disease’s hallmark brain plaques, and tangles of a protein named tau that clogs dying brain cells. One theory: Amyloid may start the disease while tau speeds up the brain destruction.

Previous studies of anti-amyloid drugs have failed, but the new international study will test a different one, in a different way. About 300 people from a huge extended family in Colombia who share a gene mutation that triggers Alzheimer’s in their 40s will test an experimental drug, Genentech’s crenezumab, to find out whether it delays the onset of symptoms. The study will include some Americans who inherit Alzheimer’s-causing gene mutations.

The first National Alzheimer’s Plan also promises to support overwhelmed families along the way.

“A lot more needs to be done and it needs to be done right now, because people with Alzheimer’s disease and their loved ones and caregivers need help right now,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in announcing the plan.

A new Web site — Alzheimers.gov — that Sebelius called a one-stop shop for families offers easy-to-understand information about dementia and links to resources. The government will offer free training to doctors and other health-care providers on how to spot the early signs of Alzheimer’s and care for those patients. This summer, a campaign will begin to improve public awareness of the disease.

Patient advocates applauded the move, and country music legend Glen Campbell, who has Alzheimer’s, appeared on Capitol Hill to urge more research.

By http://www.washingtonpost.com/