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December 16, 2012 The House speaker is showing new flexibility on tax rates in talks with President Obama on the "fiscal cliff." Boehner has proposed allowing income tax rates to increase on people making more than $1 million a year as long as the president agreed to substantial spending cuts.

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December 14, 2012 Means testing Medicare is one of the few areas where Democrats have shown a willingness to even consider the subject of spending less on the program. But not everyone supports that idea.

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December 13, 2012 President Obama hosted House Speaker John Boehner Thursday, spending nearly an hour together in which they discussed ways to avert the looming "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax hikes that will arrive at the end of 2012. Boehner left the White House at 6 p.m., apparently without reaching a deal.

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December 13, 2012 Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said President Obama is making a "serious effort" to work with Republicans. Just 32 percent said Republicans are making a serious effort to work with the Democratic president.

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December 12, 2012 A look at the proportion of Republicans and Democrats speaking on air in relation to the "fiscal cliff" offers an insight into political bias by NPR. The finding? A pretty even balance, despite a slight Republican tilt in the numbers. But further dissection welcomed.

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December 12, 2012 Democrats are worried that cuts to the program will go beyond the impact on the people it serves. It will also affect the Affordable Care Act, which calls for expanding Medicaid to as many as 16 million more people. The states are watching closely because the federal government has promised it will pay most of those additional costs.

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December 11, 2012 The offer from the speaker follows his remarks on the House floor in which he said the White House was slow-walking the process. Unless a deal is reached, automatic across-the-board spending cuts and sweeping tax increases are scheduled to go into effect at the first of the year.

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December 11, 2012 As the White House and Congressional leaders negotiate, we're watching for the best stories about what's going on. Here are some of the latest.

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December 10, 2012 After President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner's face-to-face meeting, there's talk about an agreement soon being struck. But every such analysis also comes with many caveats.

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December 9, 2012 The closed-door meeting between the two men may be the first positive signs in days that negotiations may be moving forward. Meanwhile, a top Republican said Senate Republicans could agree to higher taxes on the richest Americans if it meant getting a chance to overhaul entitlement programs.

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December 7, 2012 Metaphors can be great for framing the urgency of a problem, but what do you do when the image isn't accurate? If you are the president or a Republican Congressional leader, you keep hammering with the metaphor anyway. It's all Ben Bernanke's fault.

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December 6, 2012 As House Speaker John Boehner tries to work with President Obama to prevent automatic tax increases and spending cuts, he is taking heat from members of his own party. Some conservatives think he gave up too much, too soon in his opening offer.

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December 6, 2012 The 81-year-old former senator busts some moves (sort of) in a video that tells young people to press their elders for a solutions to the nation's debt and deficit problems.

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December 5, 2012 The president and House Republicans continued to snipe at each other Wednesday over the impending set of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff. President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner later spoke briefly by phone for the first time in a week, according to reports.

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