Reaching an agreement on raising the debt ceiling has been complicated by Republican refusal to raise taxes on "anyone" (meaning big corporations like oil companies) under any circumstance. The problem with that argument is that if they don't reach an agreement by August 2nd, those corporations won't have the customers they need to stay afloat anyways, as the U.S. defaulting on its debts would send the economy into a double-dip recession (that or the IMF doesn't know what it's talking about).
If those tax cuts have been working for the past decade or so, how come employment has been stagnant during the years they've been in effect? Tax cuts are not the issue: a percentage of jobs have been lost permanently to hi-tech outsourcing and to cheap overseas markets.