Eli Yokley

— The ball of the fiscal cliff is in President Barack Obama’s court, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt said Tuesday morning.

Speaking during his weekly conference call with Missouri journalists, Blunt said Obama needs to present a plan to address the nation’s fiscal concerns that is mindful of the Republican party having maintained control of one half of Congress.

“We need to understand he just got re-elected president and he needs to understand that Republicans in the House easily maintained control of the House of Representatives saying they were for exactly the opposite things that he’s said he was for,” Blunt said. “A solution here that works has to be a solution that works for everybody”

Blunt said he remains optimistic that Obama and House Republicans will join together in some kind of agreement before the end of the calendar year.

“The Republican Senate leadership is talking about this every single day to try and create an environment where the president can come up with a solution that works for everybody, and I believe there is one,” he said.

That solution, he said, will be a combination of entitlement reform and increased revenues. What Blunt is not for, he said, is increasing tax rates. Instead, he said Republicans support “making the tax code fairer and flatter.”

“Raising tax rates will not help the economy,” he said.