WASHINGTON, December 26 (RIA Novosti) - US President Barack Obama will cut short his Christmas vacation in Hawaii on Wednesday and return to Washington ahead of a looming deadline to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” of more than $500 billion in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to kick in Jan. 1.
Obama is scheduled to arrive in Washington on Thursday morning, the White House said. It did not specify whether the president had meetings scheduled with lawmakers in the US Congress on a plan to avoid or postpone the tax hikes and austerity measures, which economists say could plunge the country into recession.
Obama has been locked in a bitter standoff over a budget deal with the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives.
The president has insisted that any deal must include tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, a condition that many Republicans in the House have fiercely opposed.
Congress is expected to resume its work Thursday, though neither the House nor the US Senate has pending legislation on their dockets that would deal with the budget crisis.
The Democratic-controlled Senate could pass a last-minute bill that would head off the spending cuts and a majority of the tax increases, NBC News cited lawmakers and Congressional aides as saying Wednesday.
Republicans could block the move with a legislative maneuver known as a “filibuster.”
