WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress' failed deficit-cutting supercommittee has faded away, but a stack of expensive economic problems facing lawmakers has not.
By the time they quit town for the year around Christmas, Congress has to decide whether it will extend payroll tax cuts for more than 120 million families plus benefits for millions of long-term jobless people.
Lawmakers also have to figure out how to avert a mid-December government shutdown, and how to avoid deep cuts that will otherwise occur in Medicare payments to doctors.
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All of this could cost $200 billion or more. Yet Republicans and some Democrats are not in a mood to add that much to federal deficits that are already huge, so that price tag could shrink.
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