This is what we want House Republicans to do: 1. Pass a bill making permanent all of the Bush/Obama tax cuts; 2. Pass a budget with 5% less spending in absolute dollars this year vs. last; 3. Pass a bill ending the process of the CBO known as "baseline budgeting." This is why we want them to do these things: 1) The President and the Democrats have turned these negotiations into a simple blaming exercise; they do not wish to avoid the "Fiscal Cliff" and have no intention of cutting government spending under any circumstances. 2) The President and the Democrats won the election fair and square, but so did all of the elected House Republicans. 3) When negotiating with a partner that is opposed to all of your goals, the proper strategy is to do what is right, allow them to play their cards, and let the chips fall where they may. 4) The best year House Republicans have had in a long time was 2010, in which House Republicans won big victories by standing strong against Obamacare, despite losing that particular fight. 5) Conclusion: standing strong wins support of the country, even if you lose the fight. American Republicans and Conservatives desperately want you to stand strong. We should not make this negotiation about who gets blame, or about what will happen when the other side plays their cards. Do what is right, stick by your guns, and if the other side causes disaster, so be it. We should not seek a lesser disaster by compromising on our principals, especially if the reality is that we cannot much change the scope of disaster that is going to be brought on us by bad governance on the part of the officials we've elected anyway. The pain is coming. Stand strong and oppose the causes of that pain with everything we've got, and the voters will reward you. Future electorates will consider whether the Republican party truly is the party of low taxes and fiscal discipline. We will not understand nor consider the nuance of being powerless, the multi-stage plans to give the President his way, or to manage decline along with our philosophical enemies. We will only see votes, and proposals. This is the time in which House Republicans can prove they are worthy of our loyalty. Signers and Those Considering Signing: 1) Tax increases, especially those proposed by the President and Democrats, will not and cannot raise enough revenue to put a dent in the deficit spending we add to our debt each year; CBO estimates the maximum possible increase in revenue at about $80Billion, and that is without taking into account the depressive effect that tax rate increases have on GDP, and therefore on tax receipts. 2) We are overspending our budget by over $1Trillion dollars each year under this President and Senate. The Senate has not passed a budget in over four years, and they have ignored the budgets the house has passed. The $80Billion potential revenue from tax increases represent less than 10% of our annual budget deficit. 3) If the President and the Senate want to use their legal powers to ruin the country, let it not be because we helped them, or we acquiesced to their demands, or we compromised our own principles of fiscal sanity, balanced budgets, and common sense cuts in order to avoid the pain that bad governance brings about. Instead let's do what's right, and let their side be the bad guys who fail to act and therefore cause or allow the problems. 4) The tax rates of today need to be made permanent. Tax policy executed on a short-term basis (2 years here, 6 month extension here) adds to business uncertainty, and makes for a bad climate in which to hire or conduct long term investments. We need to stop tinkering with the tax code, make the rates stable, and then get to work on balancing the budget so we live within our means. This is simple, and it will unleash the power of the American free market system if we let it. 5) Someone is Washington has to start marking cuts, and those cuts MUST be in terms of absolute dollars from the current year expenditures. In other words, the cuts must be against a baseline of real dollars spent, not an automatically increasing baseline of projected spending increases. Baseline budgeting has been a total disaster, growing the federal behemoth since it was instituted in 1974. It has been very bad law and needs to be repealed.