More spending, not less
“Hope to end ‘fiscal-cliff’ impasse shifts to Senate” [news, Dec. 24] quotes two Republican senators as favoring an accommodation with Obama “even if it means that taxes would go up for those with high incomes but that spending cuts would be put off.”

That’s the same ruse that Democrats have perpetrated on the people of the United States at least twice before: once during the Reagan administration, the other during the GHW Bush administration. Taxes were increased, but the promised spending cuts never materialized.

Congressional Republicans should not fall for this scam again. The Democrat Party has no intention of cutting any spending — except for defense.

It was the lack of meaningful spending cuts that doomed the Super Committee, of which Sen. Patty Murray was co-chair. It’s the same issue that dogs Congress and the president today. If we go over the cliff, at least we'll have some definitive spending cuts.

— Maurice E Marler, Renton

Shame on Republicans
Reading Paul Krugman's excellent column on the Republicans’ refusal to accept reality [“Fiscal-cliff poker: when to fold them, when to hold them,” Opinion, Dec. 21], I found myself wondering: How can they forget the eight years under President Bush, a veritable laboratory for their crazy theories? How can they ignore two Nobel Prize-winning economists who have tried to explain how the real economic world works?

Last time I checked Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan certainly didn't have those credentials, but never mind. They want what they want when and how they want it. Toddlers learn by trial and error as they experience the world.

Poor John Boehner. He has some real challenges dealing with these guys who don't seem able — like the toddlers — to learn from experience but persist in a course of action that will certainly take us all down. Shame on them.

—Ellen Zarter, Bellevue