Updated 11:43 am ET President Barack Obama’s fiscal cliff negotiator, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, predicted on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that congressional Republicans will accept Obama’s plan to raise income tax rates and limit deductions on people making $200,000 and over. “I think we’re going to get there,” he told NBC’s David Gregory.

He said if Republican leaders have their own alternative ways to reduce federal deficits, they need to offer Obama their proposals.

“We need to know what they’re prepared to do on (tax) rates and revenues and we need to know what they’re prepared to do on the spending side,” he said.

So far, Geithner said, they have not said “who should pay higher taxes.”

In contrast, Geithner said, Obama has been specific, for example, about how he’d shift more of the burden of paying for Medicare to affluent retirees: his fiscal year 2013 budget proposal would increase premiums and co-payments for higher-income Medicare beneficiaries, starting in 2017.

“If the Republicans don’t like those ideas and they want to do it differently (or) they want to go beyond that, then they have to tell us what makes sense for them and then we can take a look at it,” he said.

Geithner is leading the bargaining with GOP leaders on how to avoid the “fiscal cliff” –Washington jargon for the combination of tax increases and spending reductions which are scheduled to occur under current law at the end of the year and which the Congressional Budget Office has said would tip the economy into a recession.

With 29 days left to reach an agreement on avoiding the fiscal cliff, neither GOP leaders nor the president seem to be taking steps toward an accord.

Two senators who were re-elected last month, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D- Mo., and Sen. Bob Corker, R- Tenn., also appeared on Meet the Press to comment on the fiscal cliff negotiations.

Corker said he supported “closing loopholes” which he called "a pro-growth way of getting more revenues from wealthy Americans." He predicted that ultimately “cooler heads will prevail” and the two sides will agree on a deal.

Corker said that in the fiscal cliff bargaining Obama had not yet proposed additional curbs on Medicare and other entitlement spending and he predicted “you’re not going to have a deal until that happens.”

McCaskill said if current tax rates expire at year end, then “we would come back in January first thing and pass a tax cut” along the lines of Obama’s proposal. “Are the Republicans going to vote ‘no’ on that?” she asked incredulously.

On Medicare, McCaskill said she would support “more aggressive means testing from higher co-pays from those people who can afford it.” In his Fiscal Year 2013 budget blueprint Obama proposed higher premiums and co-payments for higher-income Medicare recipients, cutting $28 billion in federal spending over ten years.

But liberal Democrats have opposed that idea, saying it could erode support for Medicare among upper-income people, leading them to opt out of the program. “This will end Medicare as we know it,” said Rep. Allyson Schwartz, D- Pa., last spring when Republicans adopted Obama’s higher premium and co-pays idea as part of the negotiations over how to offset the cost of cutting the Social Security payroll tax.

Obama’s initial fiscal cliff bargaining position has been that income tax rates and tax preferences enacted since 2001 should remain in effect for single earners making less than $200,000 a year and for married couples filing joint return who make less than $250,000.

In a statement Sunday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi urged House Speaker John Boehner to bring to the floor a bill already passed by the Senate to continue current income tax rates for people making less than $200,000.

She said if Boehner "refuses to schedule this widely-supported bill for a vote, Democrats will introduce a discharge petition to automatically bring to the floor the Senate-passed middle class tax cuts." A discharge petition is procedure by which a bill may be forced out of a committee and onto the House floor for a vote. The Democrats would need to get 218 members of the House to sign a discharge petition in order for this procedure to succeed.

Republican leaders oppose any tax increase, although they would agree to a redesign of the income tax system that could raise more revenues for the federal government by ending or curtailing some deductions and other tax breaks.

The GOP leaders also want some plan for reductions in spending on Medicare and other entitlements.

The fiscal cliff refers to:

• The expiration at year end of tax reductions enacted in 2001, 2003, 2009, and 2010.
• A 27 percent cut in Medicare’s payment rates for doctors’ services.
• A ten percent cut in defense spending and an 8 percent cut in nondefense spending -- cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act which Obama signed into law in 2010 as a part of a deal with Republicans to get them to agree to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit.
• The end of emergency unemployment benefits.
• The end of a temporary reduction of 2 percentage points in the Social Security payroll tax which was in effect this year and in 2011.

In addition the Affordable Care Act will impose, starting in January, a new 3.8 percent Medicare payroll tax on income above $200,000 and will expand the tax to cover investment income as well as wage and salary income.

About two-thirds of the fiscal cliff comes from the impending tax increases scheduled to take effect at the beginning of 2013 under current law.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, "Taxes would rise by more than $500 billion in 2013—an average of almost $3,500 per household—as almost every tax cut enacted since 2001 would expire."

A report issued in October by the Center found that almost 90 percent of Americans would see their taxes rise unless Congress and the president agree to change current law. "For most households, the two biggest increases would be the expiration of the temporary cut in Social Security taxes and the expiration of the 2001/2003 tax cuts," the report said.

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President Barack Obama speaks at Capital University on August 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. President Obama began a two-day tour of Ohio and Nevada to discuss the choice in this election between two different visions of how to expand the economy.

Broadening his attack on Republicans’ plans to curb federal spending, President Barack Obama campaigning in Ohio Tuesday portrayed GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as intent on “gutting investments in education and science and infrastructure.”

Obama said in his speech at Capital University in Columbus, “Putting a college education within reach for working families just doesn’t seem to be a big priority for my opponent.”

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Judged by his ten-year budget blueprint which unlike Romney’s education proposal has actually been approved by one house of Congress, Ryan isn’t satisfied with the return the federal government is getting on its investment in education.

“While Federal spending on the Department of Education and related education programs has grown significantly over the past few decades, academic achievement has not seen a commensurate improvement,” Ryan said in the report accompanying his budget plan.

Ryan’s ten-year budget blueprint proposes to reduce some federal education outlays as part of its overall 12 percent cut in spending over ten years, for example consolidating and eliminating some of the 82 initiatives on improving the quality of teaching in public schools.

Under Obama, Congress has created a new tax break for higher education, the American Opportunity tax credit, as well as increasing the maximum size of Pell Grants by $900.

One focal point of the campaign debate has been what Ryan would do to Pell Grants, the single largest source of federal aid to low-income students for college education.

For the 2010-2011 academic year Pell Grants provided about $37 billion in aid to nearly 9 million students.

In his budget plan report, Ryan argued that “Pell Grants are the perfect example of promises that cannot be kept. The program is on an unsustainable path” due to legislation since 2007 including the Obama stimulus law that “made Pell Grants more generous than the Federal budget could afford.” He pointed out that the cost of the Pell Grant program has more than doubled since 2008, from $16 billion in 2008 to more than $36 billion in fiscal year 2013.

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While Obama has proposed a maximum Pell Grant award of $5,635 for 2013- 2014, Ryan’s plan proposes a maximum award of $5,550.

Ryan also wants to “ensure aid is targeted to the truly needy” by the changing the formula which the Department of Education uses to determine how much a student and his or her family can be expected to contribute toward the student’s college tuition.

Although some federal support for education is in the form of direct spending, such as Pell Grants, much of it is in the form of tax breaks, such as the Hope education tax credit (worth about $5 billion a year) and the deductibility of charitable contributions to educational institutions, worth about $6.5 billion.

A witness at last month’s Senate Finance Committee hearing on education, James White of Congress’s watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, testified there isn’t enough data to know which of the tax breaks is most cost-effective in getting students to finish college or university.

When Sen. John Thune, R- S.D., asked White if Congress were forced to pick only one education tax break, which one should survive, White answered: “Part of the problem here is that we are spending tens of billions of dollars on these programs and we don’t know the answer to the question you are asking.”

Some economists and tax policy experts have questioned whether the tax breaks for higher education aren’t contributing to an inflationary spiral.

Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation testified to the Senate Finance Committee last month that federal subsidies for higher education are “fueling higher college costs by disconnecting student-consumers from the true cost of higher education. In turn, the benefits of these programs get capitalized into tuition costs because universities can boost tuitions without suffering the normal market backlash.”

(Hodge’s group aims for a “neutral” tax code that is designed simply to raise enough revenue for the government to function, without tax breaks for favored groups or industries.)

Obama noted in his speech in Ohio Tuesday that over the past two decades, tuition and fees at American colleges and universities have more than doubled.

“I put colleges and universities on notice: if they can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding they get from taxpayers will go down. We want to give them some incentive to start lowering tuition,” he said.

A question that for now is going mostly un-debated in all the 2012 speech-making is why America isn’t getting better outcomes from its education investments.

According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests students in 37 countries on their math, science and reading skills, average scores for U.S. 15-year old students were at about the average level for the entire group of 37 nations, but were below average in math.

Students in more than a dozen nations, including France, Finland, Australia, Japan, and Korea performed significantly better than American students on the PISA math test. Each of those nations also spends less per student than the United States does – on average about 30 percent less, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“When we invest in your future, we’re investing in America’s future,” Obama said to students Tuesday at his Ohio campaign stop. “Businesses are mobile in the 21^st century economy – they can locate anywhere – so they’re going to create jobs and they’re going to hire wherever they find the best educated, most highly skilled workers. And I don’t want them to have to look any further than right here in Columbus, right here in Ohio, right here in the United States of America.”

He also said, “The fact is that countries that out-educate us today – they’ll be able to outcompete us tomorrow.” And according to OECD and PISA data, most of those countries are spending less on education and getting more educated students than the United States is.