The Democrats and the fiscal cliff

Not much on the table

The president is offering little incentive for the Republicans to compromise in talks on America’s “fiscal cliff”

See article

Readers' comments


Freddy Hutter, TrendLines Research

This week's talks in DC appear to be merging around $2 trillion in cuts over the next ten years, but the leftist media does not explain to folks the cuts are not cuts, but merely a slowing of the spending increases. The Debt Wall model calculates the federal debt will rise (on its present course) another $13.8 trillion over the next ten years. Today's $16.4 trillion debt becomes $30.2 trillion in 2022. It also projects the Debt Limit will handcuff Congress on Dec 24th, requiring creative manoeuvrings by the Treasury Dept for the following six weeks.
Six more trillion dollar Deficits are planned and assure there will be no Recession. In essence, the USA federal gov't is bankrupt ... a dead man walking.
Debt Wall chart:


Who is the idiot that came up with this deluded lie that our debt is unsustainable? We owe 70% of our debt to ourselves, which is why it is clearly sustainable. It would be nice if the Economist filtered out the deluded conspiracy theorists who a stupid beyond all reason. If our debt was unsustainable, interest rates would be on the rise, the dollar would lose value, and people would be running somewhere else to invest their money, but Europe is in a bigger mess than us. Look, people want something for nothing, so they will always try to buy debt. Our debt represents only one single year of GDP, so it is clearly sustainable.

haha, classic Medicine4theDead. Jumping into condescending conjecture even on topics where you know only enough to be dangerous (yes, you could say I'm doing it back--intentionally hypocritical). Let's clear up a few things.

1) "We owe 70% of our debt to ourselves"-You are referring to the ~30%/25%/13ish% owed to the US govt/US public/Fed, respectively. While I agree that foreign debt is more harmful than domestic, ceteris paribus, that fact in itself doesn't make the debt burden sustainable. Let's dig a bit deeper.
a) Do you think we'd have a problem if we can't pay back the 31% largely held by the Social Security Trust Fund? The fund is beginning to sell rather than accumulate these securities to pay social security pensioners as receipts fall below income. Clearly the government will need to meet this obligation to retirees (not "itself" as you indicate). As it stands now, taking into account present value of future obligations for pensioners would cause this figure to explode to $20.5trn for SS and equivalent figure for Medicare is $42.8trn. If the government were one of the public companies that you despise, these are the types of numbers that you would be seeing reported. Such a company would likely be shut off from the debt markets and equity markets and would have a very good chance of being declared bankrupt OR maybe an activist shareholder could save such a company by replacing the management team given the solid underpinnings of the revenue generating capability of the company and vast room to cut costs.
b) as for the portion held by the public, demographics are not supportive. Investor allocations in bond funds are also at elevated levels. They are unlikely to become even more bond heavy and quite possibly this allocation could decrease.
c)Add in Fed balance sheet expansion and this is another tailwind that is temporary and will actually turn into a headwind if they attempt to shrink it to something closer to a normal level.

2) I agree with your assessment of the US being the best house in a bad neighborhood. The USD is not going to depreciate significantly near term and the US Treasury market is the deepest, most liquid market with record low rates. USD safe haven status gives the US degrees of freedom not enjoyed across much of the world. However, it is a relative game and if we look ahead a couple of decades it is not very hard to see this grip loosen without policy in place to manage the deficit.

3)Whether or not the debt is sustainable depends on policy and outlook for economic growth (tied in with policy + many other factors not linked to policy). The latter buys more flexibility on the former. The good old days of 3-4% GDP growth allowed for ~3% gap in govt spending/GDP over govt revenue/GDP. We may have to look at 1-2% as the new normal. Regardless, spending/GDP is at heightened levels and needs to come down. Although this isn't being talked about much by the media during the fiscal cliff talks and tax the wealthy is making headlines (even though it does very little to address the underlying problem), degree of spending cuts is where the battle will be won or lost.

I'm hopeful, but I think your assertions that debt is sustainable because the government "owes it to itself" (a misnomer) and the fact that it is a year of GDP paper over some very serious issues and concluding that government debt is sustainable on that basis is very misguided.


Slowly I feel happy that there is a crisis in Europe. Obama and the economis should learn what could happen if there is no real debt deduction plan. I feel sorry for thos who blame the republicans everytime. Facts: Debt is unsutanaible and without a proper plan to control social spending, USA will be called Greece in a couple o years...


This newspaper, like most of the conservative press, is still stuck in October. You do not offer your freshly and completely vanquished foe incentives to compromise. On the contrary, you offer him the choice of your terms or jumping off a cliff.

'Tis called Realpolitik.

guest-ljmnnaa in reply to dhyder

That would work perfectly except the fact that the cliff hurts the republicans more than the democrats tax hikes + military spending cuts hurt the repubs whereas all the dems have to do is swallow a few social program cuts


I'm confused; why does supposed Democratic intransigence on the "necessity" of entitlement cuts (which I am not intending to address here) even matter for the fiscal cliff negotiations? Without anyone doing anything, taxes will go up and spending will go down by some $700 billion dollars, combined. That would go an enormously long way toward closing the deficit, making current entitlement programs more or less sustainable until health care cost inflation takes over in the next decade. Shouldn't these negotiations be about avoiding a new recession in 2013 by making any deficit cutting as economically efficient as possible? Of course, economic efficiency in this instance necessarily involves higher tax rates on the highest earners; that, according to virtually every single credible economic study ever done, produces the most revenue for the least economic cost, so why is the Democratic position unreasonable?


By a 2 to 1 margin, the American people blame the do-nothing Republicans who champion a minority of rich people for the fiscal situation. Good luck next election Republicans for afterwards you will be officially irrelevant.

And the GOP knows President Obama won a mandate in the November elections.
That is why Republican legislators are now considering bringing up President Obama's fiscal-cliff plan (minus the unlimited debt ceiling as the Constitution gives Congress the powers to borrow and tax, and the Treasury borrowing today means Congress having to raise taxes tomorrow to pay back the Treasury's debts) for a vote with no opposition in the House (GOP representatives will vote "Present" for quorum purposes) and no filibuster in the Senate. That way, only Democrats will cast votes for or against President Obama's fiscal-cliff plan.
If Democratic legislators pass the president's plan, then President Obama takes complete responsibility for the anemic economy and the unsustainable budget deficits (raising taxes on the wealthy will cut the budget deficit by only 12 percent or so). If Democratic legislators vote down the president's plan, then Democrats will raise taxes on the middle class and President Obama will suffer a stinging defeat from his own political party.

NEWSFLASH- the election is over and Pres Obama won. Duh. You do understanding winning?

Your comments are a rather sad reminder of how deluded Mission Accomplished Republicans are. When did you incompetents take responsibility for your deficits? Your wars? Your policies? Never. Never. Never. If you think that the American public is going to continually buy your cries of wolf, you are as ignorant as everyone thinks you are.


Your comment is quite provocative. As your arguments are meticulous and persuasive, not even the most experienced policymaker or learned commentator can match you on the substance of this discussion.

President Obama won the fiscal policy debate as well as the presidential election. All GOP legislators can do now is simply move aside and let House and Senate Democrats introduce, debate, vote on and pass President Obama's fiscal-cliff plan with absolutely no input or opposition from the GOP. Only then can President Obama begin to act like a man and take responsibility for his executive record (especially the anemic economic growth and job creation). The People cannot follow a leader who insists on hiding like a coward behind the facade of bipartisanship.

The voters demand action. If President Obama does not step up, then he needs to step down.


As you and I are in complete agreement, I owe you an apology for the tone of my comment of December 11.

Too many excuses have been given to explain away the economic policy failures (see "Excuses, excuses" in the June 4, 2011 issue of The Economist). Congressional Republicans need to move aside so that President Obama can grow up and take responsibility for his presidency (especially the $5 trillion he has added to the national debt).

President Obama is a very skilled orator. But the campaign is over and his talk is now cheap. The voters demand results. President Obama needs to put up or shut up.


The real fiscal cliff is sometime in the future when US debt levels and unfunded entitlement obligations and the cost of wars fought off the balance sheet become so great that even the Fed can't print enough money to fund the egregious overborrowing necessary and default risk is so high that interest costs crowd out all other forms of program spending. That is where Greece is now with unknown outcome, however that was where Canada was in the early 1990's with a positive outcome yet a painful decade long recovery from the brink of ruin. Unless this reality is faced squarely, any resolution of the current phony fiscal cliff will only hasten the day the real fiscal cliff arrives. Thinking about long term unintended consequences of current actions is what economists are supposed to do. So why isn't anyone doing it?

just another trader

"Nor is the sum the president proposed to save as a result: $400 billion, just a quarter of the $1.6 billion that he says he is seeking in tax increases."

Should this be $1.6 trillion? 1.6 trillion / 4 = 400 billion.

Peter Gray17

The Democrats offer is tantamount to a drug addict request: give me one more hit and I promise to be good from now on. Moreover, if you listen to the language being used by the President it appears that it is not about revenues but about sticking it to the rich. The revenues from hiking taxes (on "millioners and billioners", i.e., according to Mr. Obama those who make more than $250K a year) will bring a pittance of around $160B, which is almost meaningless in balancing the budget.

Dr Lou

'Stingier methods to increase Social Security payments and raising the age for Medicare eligibility is hardly an 'anathema' to 'left wingers' but to a huge cross section of American voters both right, left and middle. The tendency by The Economist and other media sources to focus 'blame' for resistance to so called entitlement reform on the 'left' is remarkably simplistic and narrow in its take.

For point, the term 'entitlement' is also clearly not wholly understood. Social Security is a 'retirement account' managed by the Federal Government into which a majority of American workers have been making contributions throughout their working lives. Changes are needed but SS must be first viewed as a 'contract' rather than a hand out; American workers will largely not tolerate retroactively changing the terms of that contract.

And that is not a 'left' or 'right' thing but a common sense thing. People expect the promised return on their investment and work.

Peter Gray17 in reply to Dr Lou

Doctor (?) Lou, you are wrong my friend. Social security is not, has never been and was never intended to be a retirement account. It was thought of as tax of today's employees to pay for the former ones (I use "employees" carefully for the employer is not paying de facto those taxes; they are taken out of value produced by the employee). The monies paid under Social Security taxes do not go to a separate account for the payor but to the general revenue fund (craftly disguised via meaningless I-owe-you's).

There is a way to convert it into a pension system but the left would never ever agree to it. It means getting the contributions out of the government hands and placing it into individual accounts. And that of course the dreadful "privatization".

Dr Lou in reply to Peter Gray17 in a PhD kind of Doctor in a clinical practice field.

Despite the small contortions you've made in your refutation of my post, the gist of which I'll not directly address for the time being, the fundamental premise that a key intended outcome of Social Security is money paid back at retirement doesn't change.

And I'll note that part of your contortions seem to be in the intriguing and not altogether clear explanation of SS as a 'tax of today's workers to pay for former ones...' That would be to pay for what, exactly? SS also might be seen as a kind of per employee subsidy of the business owner as he or she has the U.S government backing up retirement benefits of their employees.

In that most workers have multiple jobs over a lifetime, SS, unlike medical insurance unfortunately, is able to follow them across employers and return benefits once a certain age is hit; an age typically defined as 'retirement.'In this, is a major strength of the SS system.

Further, SS is taken out of the salary of each employee depending on their levels of salary across jobs thereby paying out more...or less...upon 'retirement.' You are right that SS is not a tax but based on levels of employment and salary. Too often, that 'value' is artificial controlled by employers many of whom never pay individual employees the true 'value' of their productivity.

SS, of course, is not a traditional pension system and was not intended to as such. And this is a good thing in that true pensions are reactive to the market, investment portfolios and the like and can rise and fall with the wind. Well, that is true for most of us in the 99%, anyway. SS is a stable safety net; work, pay in and get a predictable return. Not great by any means but predictable and helpful.

The free market, however, is always there to provide all kinds of additional and add on pension plans as most of us have in one form or another. But regardless of how those investments move along, SS remains our one stable expectation once a certain age is hit.

The accounting processes behind SS have long been manipulated by both parties and certainly need revisions. But, again, this issue still do not change the 'pact' that American workers rightly believe was made with them starting when SS was deducted from their very first paychecks.

And this, my friend, is a perception of the Left, Right and Middle in the U.S. In this was a key point of my original post; that pretending the Right has it down and real answers but for resistance by the 'Left' is flatly incorrect.

The 'pact' that is Social Security is an American perception; a fact that the pandering politicians, all of them but with a unique focus on the Right side of the aisle, still do not get.


In this overhyped media created firestorm, where can I find some serious adult policy assessment? Clearly not from TE ... "It is not that Democrats want these things; rather, they assume that Republicans would become much less obdurate in negotiations if such calamities were already unfolding". Well actually, there is nothing calamitous that occurrs on January 1st, there is no shift in the tax code or spending cut legislation that can't be reversed retroactively. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon with the mainscream media, you might want to assess potential reasons why the GOP and the Dems might be better off passing laws in January than right now. For the GOP it is much easier to sell the fact that they cut taxes for the 98% in January than raised taxes for the 2% in December. For the Democrats it is much easier to discuss entitlement reform in January after the spending cuts on defense and other programs are beginning to be enacted ... it gives them a bargaining chip against the GOP who want always to increase defense spending. The resulting expense and tax package negotiated in January could be identical to one hammered out now but in January everyone gets political cover which is really the only currency of any value in Washington these days. The hypocisy and BS continues to be breathtaking to me as I become more and more pessimistic that competent adult leadership will ever return to the USA, but I believe that no deal will be done until January, so please TE, take a stand against media's overblown "fiscal cliff" rhetoric to attempt to turn down the heat on this a bit.


Yes its true Democrats should offer more spending cuts to secure a deal - but the Republican's tax offer is still pretty mild.

The United States is the only country in the industrialized world without a national consumption tax, which could raise enough revenue to wipe out the deficit entirely.

The closest the Republicans are willing to go is a federal tax on contraception and women's hygine products( But clearly they're proposing the so-called 'Tampon Tax' for the wrong reasons.

A full consumption tax on all goods except food is a vital part of any deficit reduction package, and its not even on the table!

Kroneborge in reply to tjefferson

I would be very willing to support a consumption tax if we got rid of the income tax system, something like the Fair Tax would work very well.

But if you're just talking about massive tax hikes, forget it.

Greg Suhr

From the website, in 2008 US government outlays were 2,982,544 million dollars. In 2012, they are estimated to be 3,795,547 million dollars, a 27% increase in 4 years. Over the same period, annual inflation has averaged 1.08% and the cumulative increase was 7%. Since spending growth is far outpacing inflation, it seems clear to me that the problem is too much spending.

Interestingly, if we could go back to spending levels of 2005 the budget would be in balance this year without tax increases. If we could go back to 2004, we would have a surplus of roughly 170,000 million dollars. I would not really mind paying more taxes if I thought it would solve the problem, but I am certain that whatever I pay the government can spend that and more until we have nothing left.

Gary C in reply to Greg Suhr

The main driver of higher spending now is the downturn in the economy. When people are unemployed they collect unemployment. When they're unemployed or working very low paying jobs they're using food stamps and medicaid. When people have good jobs they're not using these services and they're paying taxes.

Greg Suhr in reply to Gary C

I have heard others say it is spending on the war in Afghanistan or financial bailouts of banks or shovel ready stimulus jobs.......but in the end I don't think it matters. When the government spends it consumes, it doesn't create wealth. The more it spends the more is consumed and the less capital there is for producers to invest. Consequently growth is reduced and we end up where we are.

If government spending was the secret to wealth creation, Kruschev would have been correct and the old Soviet Union would have buried us. They didn't and it isn't.

Medicine4theDead in reply to Greg Suhr

No, you are wrong. Investments in infrastructure and education are investments, not spending. Where would FedEx and UPS be without government roads? Google without the government created Internet? Rush Limbaugh without the public airwaves. If you cannot cognitively think things through, you may want to leave the discussion to the grown-ups.

The Soviet Unions wasn't socialist like the northern European democracies of today which have government and trade surpluses, it was an authoritarian command economy.

Greg Suhr in reply to Medicine4theDead

@Medicine4theDead – perhaps you are not from the United States so your ignorance is understandable. In the US, roads and education are primarily a state and local function. According to the Office of Management and Budget, less than 2 percent of all federal spending went to “ground transportation” in 2012 which includes not just spending on highways, but subsidies for Amtrak and Obama’s high-speed rail plans as well. Likewise, the federal department of education did not even exist until 1979 and the expenditures of that department are insignificant relative to the federal budget. Again on the order of 2% of the total.
As for the internet, that is provided by private companies. I used to work for Genuity with Ray Tomlinson – the inventor of email – and I can promise you we were not a government entity. The internet transport links are provided by the same companies that carry long distance telephone traffic and the switching nodes and server farms are private as well. As for the public airwaves, you do understand that the government has nothing to do with their existence don’t you? Granted, they coordinate who may use what portion of the spectrum, but the spectrum itself is there whether the government exists or not. That is fundamental physics.
What you, and in honesty many others overlook, is that all the money the government “invests” is money they have taken from someone else. They produce nothing of significance themselves, they are merely middlemen, taking from one and giving to another. If you doubt me, can you name anything they actually produce, a car, a house, an apple? There may be something, but I can’t think of anything that I have used.
BTW – your use of cognitively in your post is redundant, much like naval warship or foot pedal.

Medicine4theDead in reply to Greg Suhr

Perhaps you are a communist traitor living in the US because you are living a lie and in a past that doesn't exist today. Would you also like to tell me about wagon trains in the 1800s? Also, I never said that the government ran the Internet, I said it created it. You blather on and on about something I didn't say like most right wing idiots who are full of themselves. And thank you for illustrating the effectiveness of federal government spending on roads and education.

The government manages the licenses that control the use of the spectrum, so without the government the public airwaves would be useless to all but a few players as it was when radios first came out.

"the money the government 'invests' is money they have taken from someone else" This is nothing but rubbish. Where is the proof? Where? This is just mindless right wing drivel used to justify the taking of services and not paying for them. Business makes money because of the government and not in spite of it. Liberty has a cost, but apparently moochers don't understand this.

Greg Suhr in reply to Medicine4theDead

The government gets money from 1.)taxes and fees - money it takes from someone today 2.) debt - money it is taking from future tax payers 3.) inflation - creating money in excess of the nations goods and services - taking it from anyone that holds dollar denominated assets.

The government doesn't create anything of value. The roads, damns, schools, etc., that you value are paid for with funds taken from someone else and the services are provided by people - not some faceless government.

I won't deny the need for some government, but I am not as enthusiastic a supporter as you. Remember, Hitler led a government, as did Stalin, Mao, Nixon, Obama and Lincoln. Any government strong enough to lift people up is strong enough to smash them down. Works out OK for you if you are on the government's side - not so well if it is against you.


Such ridiculous hyperbole ("gory" cuts and related "calamities") is not confined to The Economist; it's everywhere. This is worse than when every major media outlet and talking head said last year that not increasing the debt limit would cause default, which was a 100% falsehood but nearly everyone bought it without a moment of thought.
People: There is no "cliff;" it's not even a curb. (The real cliff is what we'll face in a few years if spending is not slashed and the dollar becomes trash). I'll take the sequester, tax restoration, and temporary spending recession ANY DAY; at least the growth in U.S. government debt (now a whopping 100% of GDP) might be slower than it was.
Those so-called "negotiations" to "save us" from the "cliff" are merely petty arguments over how best to keep Americans spending instead of repairing their balance sheets and how to ensure that "defense" contractors can keep devising new ways to provoke enemies, bomb the innocent and weak, and create more terrorists who hate the U.S. (so we can justify even more military spending!). Both sides of the aisle are demonstrably opposed to any discusson about whether the government is out of control and are desperate to keep up the illusion of prosperity by goosing spending even more.
It is simply bad economics to argue that just because government spending is added into GDP that it is good for the economy, that spending must be maintained because people are still unemployed, and that tax cuts and tax simplification benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.
So bring on the so-called "cliff." Better than arguing over two ways to raise $800 billion in more taxes so we can maintain even faster spending! Or perhaps bring us some actual spending cuts and some faint evidence to give hope for future discipline. But don't try to sell us that the most important thing in the world is that the lowest-regarded group in the world (politicians) simply must get their way or else we'll all die in the streets from sickness and terrorism. No serious person buys that guff anymore.

Gary C in reply to berferd

Are you forgetting that tax revenue as a percent of GDP is at its lowest level in over 50 years (with the exception of 1989 and 1990)? Letting taxes return to what they were under Clinton would still leave the US with lower tax revenue than the average of the second half of the 20th century.

At the end of Clinton's tenure we had a surplus AND the benefits the Tea Party is telling us we can't afford. Yes we need to trim Medicare and Social Security but we don't need to gut these programs.

Once the economy improves we need to rescind the middle-class tax cuts but for now we can only afford to let the upper income tax cuts lapse. Cutting deductions needs to take place in addition to returing to the pre-Bush tax rates until we've paid down the debt.

berferd in reply to Gary C

Thanks for posting. No, not forgetting or denying that. We are agreed we need some cutting, not gutting, of programs like Soc Sec and those cuts should spare the neediest; tide them over and cut the real waste. We would probably also agree that the best places to cut are military interventionism, the insane war on drugs, and virtually all corporate welfare.


Suppose for a minute that someone in Congress proposed a law that would abandon tax revenue and place a major industry off the books and totally outside the law. Say it is an industry that employs more than 1% of the population and is patronized by more than 25%. Abandoned tax revenue would be in the tens of billions a year, or more. Neither the employees nor their employers would pay any taxes. Nor would there be any taxes on the product, or many of the supplies. Under the new law there would be no purity, safety, labeling or even packaging standards for the products. New products could be marketed at any time with no oversight. Teenagers and even children would be recruited as customers and salesmen. There would be no safety standards for the employees, no pensions, no vacations, no sick pay, no health care, no collective bargaining. The products could be made anywhere including residential locations in unsupervised factories that pollute, poison and often explode or burn down. Employers could fire, physically punish or kill employees at will, but pay themselves huge bonuses and collect unimaginable perquisites. Dissatisfied employees would have no recourse, except violence. Since the industry officially would not exist, all traffic would be covert i.e., smuggled. Who is better at smuggling than international organized crime: the CIA, al-Qaeda, the Taliban perhaps? Competitors, denied due process would settle disputes by violence creating a feudal secondary government with large armies and a black market for military weapons, equally unregulated.

Would anyone vote for such a bill?

To further complicate the matter assume that while the industry is totally unregulated contact with the products (direct or implied) will be a crime that has severe penalties. With the industry underground, enforcement would be random. Overzealous enforcers would cram the prisons with mostly harmless people (including your children, people you know, love and depend on) costing more billions. Prisons become crime universities. Your natural rights as a human being will be subordinated to the enforcement effort. Your property could be seized on mere suspicion.

Would anyone vote for that now?

Surprise, Congress has already passed it, bit by bit and it’s known collectively as the War On Drugs and it has been being lost for over 100 years.

Gary C

The Democrats aren't offering much but the Republicans haven't made credible proposals to cut spending and no detail on what deductions they propose cutting.

For Social Security the minimum benefit should at least retain its current inflation indexing but for larger benefits the indexing could be lowered (or eliminated) to cut costs.

Medicare benefits received that exceed the amount paid in should be billed to estates. Most estates wouldn't be able to pay the bill and it would lower inheritances but in many cases the government would receive at least partial reimbursement.

These changes would hit middle income Americans (like me) the hardest.

Finally the caps on income subjet to Social Security and Medicare taxes should be eliminated.


As The Economist pointed out a couple weeks back, 70% more revenue can be generated by capping deductions at $50,000 than by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy.

The insistence that these marginal rates rise seems to be driven purely by politics, not economics.

Nor do I have any confidence that Pelosi would deliver the votes of House Democrats if they do not absolutely have to give ground on entitlement spending. When Rahm Emanuel advocated a smaller health reform bill that could win over moderate Republicans, it was Pelosi who convinced Obama to try instead for the bill that achieved as many Democratic priorities as possible.

derridaderider in reply to Anakha82

How wicked of Ms Pelosi to convince Obama to try for a bill that did what she, Obama and the majority of representatives were all elected with a mandate to do. Obama has been far too patient with an obstructive MINORITY.

The US simply does not have a deficit problem, nor does it have an entitlement problem. It has an unsustainable, unaffordable tax cut problem brought on by people who preferred convenient lies - "tax cuts increase revenue" - to hard arithmetic. If tax was levied at the rate it was under GH Bush rather than under GW Bush there would be a structural surplus.

Anakha82 in reply to derridaderider

I never said that Pelosi was wicked, only that it would be unwise to put much faith in her willingness to deliver House Democrats if their votes are needed to pass any compromise bill that Boehner and Obama may agree upon. If you think that the Democratic Party has a monopoly on all that is good and pure, then you will probably be a fan of her intransigence. But, whether good or bad, the fact remains that she has never been an advocate of compromise.



Products and events


Take our weekly news quiz to stay on top of the headlines

