Most people in Washington believe that the Sequestration will happen. Conservative sources like Fox News are busying the bandwidths by calling President Obama a liar and stating that the Sequester will not be all that bad. Conservatives like Rand Paul are backing them up by saying the President is fueling the fire and that it won’t affect public safety or travel, despite Secretary of Transportation La Hood saying otherwise.
Meanwhile, Governors like Governor McDonnell of Virginia and Governor O’Malley of Maryland have both implored the President to do all in his power to keep the sequester from happening. They fear the impact on their states, especially because of hits to the defense contact industry. The governors fear job losses, unemployment and billions taken out of the economy. Both states avoided major unemployment during the financial crash because of location and business from the federal government. In particular, in Virginia, both the Hampton Roads area and Northern Virginia remained solidly employed. Prince William County was hard-hit by foreclosure but that had nothing to do with the federal government.
This Friday, March 1, unless Congress overturns the Budget Control Act of 2011, that authorizes the Sequester, things will start to roll downhill. Federal employees can expect furloughs, no raises.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
Which agencies and programs are affected?
Most agencies would be affected, but a large number are exempt. Those affected by the cuts include the departments of energy, state, defense, labor, transportation, justice and the National Institutes of Health.
Among those exempted are the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Postal Service, which have revenue sources outside the federal budget; benefits paid by the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs; and military pay for uniformed personnel.
How will spending be cut?
First, agencies would cut back on spending such as travel and filling vacant positions, seeking to minimize the impact.
Many agencies would further reduce labor costs through the furloughs. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration has said it could force all of its 47,000 employees, including air traffic controllers, to take unpaid leave for a certain period.
The Social Security Administration said the cuts could mean it takes longer for Americans to file retirement and disability claims, and the Internal Revenue Service has said they could complicate the April tax filing season.
How will the cuts be allocated?
The cuts will be split among around 1,200 different federal programs, and then extended to tens of thousands of subprograms and projects.
The reductions would be split into three broad categories.
1) Defense spending, which includes Pentagon and defense intelligence spending, accounts for half the sequester cuts. Many of these programs will be reduced by roughly 13% over seven months.
2) Non-defense spending. This would include housing, education, or transportation programs.
3) Medicare. There will be a 2% cut in the payments to Medicare providers, such as hospitals and doctors.
The cuts will not have to be spread evenly. Agencies probably will spread the cuts evenly to avoid concentrations.
Meanwhile, various agencies warned Barbara Mikulski, Chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee of the following, according to abcnews.com:
In separate letters to Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., they warned of terrible things: Greater risk of wildfires, fewer OSHA inspections and a risk of more workplace deaths, 125,000 people risking homelessness with cuts to shelters and housing vouchers, neglect for mentally ill and homeless Americans who would lose services, Native Americans getting turned away from hospitals, cuts to schools on reservations and prison lockdowns. There’s also a higher risk of terrorism with surveillance limited and the FBI potentially unable to disrupt plots, closed housing projects, and 600,000 women and children thrown off WIC.
So is the Sequester just a hyped up scare tactic brought on by President Obama or is it a real financial scare? Will the stock market be affected? Will people in our area loose their jobs as defense spending is cut? Will Northern Virginia be affected? Do you know anyone who has lost their job already?
Why won’t Congress budge on this one? In my mind, it all goes back to the debt ceiling crisis created by tea party members of the Republican Congress in July of 2011. Will they continue to try to destroy the country before they get voted out of office?
More reading on local effects of Sequestration at Potomaclocal.com.
If I were willing to waste my money on betting, I would put a lot of money on high-drama scare tactics and finger-pointing for the next few days, and then the heroic eleventh-hour White House save. It’s hard to forget that Obama was for the sequester before he was against it. It was his negotiating team that came up with the defense cuts in 2011, not the Republicans. Unfortunately, today’s scatterbrained Republican leadership is no match for Obama’s PR machine.
Emma, Obama was NEVER FOR the sequester. It was an alternative that beat defaulting on the nation’s debt. Nothing more, nothing less. To say otherwise is simply a lie.
Blame, blame blame. Will these men ever grow up?
Perhaps sequester will help Americans realize just how much we depend on the federal government for things like air travel. If Americans want smaller government, here is what it will look like. Air travel will be the first place most will feel the impact, but it won’t be the only place. Perhaps Americans will understand that this isn’t just a Washington problem. Bring it on!
Interesting perspective from Howard Dean:
Howard Dean On Sequester: ‘Let It Happen’
Posted: 02/15/2013 1:23 pm EST | Updated: 02/15/2013 7:09 pm EST
WASHINGTON — Howard Dean is used to being an eccentric within his own party, so the fact that he’s urging Democrats to address the impending sequester by doing basically the opposite of what the Obama administration, congressional leadership and every progressive-minded economist wants shouldn’t come as a terrible shock.
“We should let it happen,” Dean said of $1 trillion in domestic, defense and Medicare spending cuts set to be triggered on March 1. “I’m in favor of the sequester. It is tough on things that I care about a lot, but the fact of the matter is, you are not going to get another chance to cut the defense budget in the way that it needs to be cut.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/howard-dean-sequester-_n_2695721.html
I mentioned to a pal that letting government contractors go might be a good thing. You are correct – many don’t realize what the govt. gives them daily or how much money is made by business off the govt.
Well, I guess these republicans who don’t think sequester will have serious negative consquences will answer to the voters when they are up for election.
I agree defense needs to be trimmed back, but not this way.
According to CBO–
The 2013 sequester includes:
$42.7 billion in defense cuts (a 7.9 percent cut).
$28.7 billion in domestic discretionary cuts (a 5.3 percent cut).
$9.9 billion in Medicare cuts (a 2 percent cut).
$4 billion in other mandatory cuts (a 5.8 percent cut to nondefense programs, and a 7.8 percent cut to mandatory defense programs).
Clinton, is that right off the bat or over 10 years?
Never mind, I see 2013 now. I asked first and looked later.
What programs are exempt?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/905
I wore out before I got through that list. I saw the one I was looking for, (she said selfishly)
Exemptions are too numerous to mention so I had to provide the link.
I think sequestration will be painful, but mainly because federal agencies are going out of their way to make it so. The cuts are not extraordinarily large so the agencies “ought” to be able to absorb them without undue pain. But my theory is that the Feds want it as painful as possible to make Americans cry uncle and accept large tax increases to avoid “catastrophic” denial of services. Government can then be free to grow, unfettered by pesky conservatives who refuse to get with the program.
@Kelly_3406 The Obama negotiating team designed the sequester exactly for that purpose. It was a trap for the Republicans, who have now become too stupid and disorganized to avoid being checkmated and then blamed for the cuts and subsequent tax increases that Obama wanted all along.
So if the Republicans are too stupid and disorganized, why would we want them making financial decisions?
What tax increases has Obama proposed recently? I must have missed them.
George Will makes a good point today that the AIG bailout cost the taxpayers $182 billion. Somehow the sky didn’t fall after that. The sequester involves cuts of $85 billion.
@Emma
I have to admit that your posts are very confusing to me. It comes as a surprise to virtually no one that Obama wants to grow government and increase taxes. Didn’t you vote for him?
But he doesn’t want to increase taxes on me. I am not rich. Works for me.
The governor wants to increase taxes also. Sometimes its necessary….when you need services typically supplied by gov. like…oh…roads.
@kelly_3406 No, in the end I couldn’t vote for him, and I’m glad I didn’t. But I don’t buy the Tea Party line of absolutely no tax increases. We still have two unfunded wars to pay for. I just want the White House to be a little more honest here. Obama wants to raise taxes, yes, that’s always been clear. But whether those taxes will go to reducing the deficit is highly doubtful. And his negotiation team came up with the sequester idea in the first place. But the impact he is crowing about seems like fake high drama, setting the stage for his heroic “save” by weeks’ end. I simply don’t believe the sky will fall on 1 March.
That is a lie. Congress mandated across-the-board cuts on all agencies and left agency management without any discretion in how to go about implementing them.
@Starryflights
Get real. There is always discretion, especially since the federal agencies have had months to prepare. They have been probably been working like crazy to obligate money in advance of sequestration. For example, even though the DoD is threatening to furlough its civilians, it just completed a large sole-source contract to modernize F-22s.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130221/DEFREG02/302210012/LM-Awarded-F-22-Modernization-Contract
Nope.
Sequestration: An Update for 2013
updated January 17, 2013
11. How much discretion does the President have in how the sequester is applied?
Almost none. The President does not have discretion to vary the size of the cut to agency budgets. The President has exercised his authority to exempt military personnel accounts from sequestration, which did not change the total defense sequester – the amount of the sequester on other defense programs will increase. All agencies will continue to have their existing transfer authority with the limitations that are specific to each agency.
http://democrats.budget.house.gov/sites/democrats.budget.house.gov/files/01.17.13%20sequestions%202013%20update.pdf
@Starryflights
I am not sure what you would expect the democrats of the budget committee of the house to say. Way to stick with nonpartisan sources!
This post should face the same disdain that posts by others who quote conservative reports do.
The truth is that there is plenty of discretion even if the cut is across the board. Do you pay for services going out or administrative costs within? Do you choose to reduce less critical services versus more critical services or do you adopt the sky is falling approach (or perhaps the Washington way of closing the Washington Monument)? Oh wait, the world didn’t end when the Washington Monument was closed for earthquake repairs did it?
Isn’t there more benefit in saying that there will be a 3 hour delay getting through security lines at airports rather than saying they need to cut back on human resource management programs of TSA?
Why should all military personnel accounts be exempt? There are plenty of military who are pencil-pushers, who have never seen (and may never see) see a war zone. Many of them are no different from any other civil servant in the kind of work they do. And there are plenty of pork projects they could put off as well.
And the agencies themselves do have discretion. It’s been all over the papers for months about how they plan on handling the cuts.
I’m not supporting these arbitrary cuts–they’re a symptom of a cowardly Congress who refuses to do one of its main jobs–to pass a budget to fund the government they supposedly “run”. But I don’t believe that locusts and frogs are going to start dropping from the sky on March 1, either.
Many of the real heavy lifters in the miltary qualify for foot stamps. That isa crime.
The icing on the cake is that Congressional salaries will be unaffected. Of course.
What happened to the plan to without pay from Congress this spring?
@Clinton S. Long
Congress designed the sequester intentionally so that agency heads would have no discretion in how to implement cuts. The point was to make the cuts so onerous that congress would have to identify more specific cuts before then, which never happened.
Regarding biased sources, even the conservative National Review agrees that agency heads need to have some leeway in managing the cuts:
“In the face of poor alternatives, it is best to accept the new spending levels for 2013, including decreased defense spending, and to focus on ensuring that the slightly smaller pool of money is managed slightly more intelligently — by, for instance, giving agency managers discretion about where the cuts come from in the near term and using the appropriations process to allocate future cuts in the out-years.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/341155/so-be-it-editors
The bit about 3-hour waits at airports is an outright lie. Every passenger pays over $3 per ticket to fund TSA airport operations. It’s right on the ticket. That was put in place post-9/11. Why haven’t they been able to function efficiently on that sum already?
Since the voters spoke…and Obama was elected….and they all want more spending…I say raise taxes. ON EVERYBODY. They voted for him. They get to pay for the increased spending.
Including the increases spending under the “sequester”. We are still increasing spending by 15 Billion.
While the assorted agencies may not be able to change HOW MUCH, they can state WHAT to cut. I agree with Emma. I said it then, too. This is cowards move on behalf of Congress to accept the President’s idea of a sequester so they don’t have to do their jobs. That’s why they don’t repeal the whole thing. THEN they would have to go on record with hard decisions. This way they can say “We CUT!” and still throw up their hands and claim to be powerless.
That’s why some conservatives voted against the entire debacle. And those guy were derided for doing so…Everything that they said would happen is coming to pass.
Congress knows its on an unsustainable path. And its terrified that the citizenry will find out. Fortunately for them, the majority of Americans have no clue how any of this works and enough of them don’t care, as demonstrated by the results of the election.
So…raise taxes… We have to pay for our spending. Forget the two wars…. Its our domestic spending that’s killing us.
Correction: It’s $2.50 per passenger, but that’s one way. It maxes at $10 depending on the number of trip legs. That’s a lot of dough for a family of four flying through Atlanta to Orlando.
“The good news is, the world doesn’t end March 2. The bad news is, the world doesn’t end March 2,” said Emily Holubowich, a Washington health-care lobbyist who leads a coalition of 3,000 nonprofit groups fighting the cuts. “The worst-case scenario for us is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens. And Republicans say: See, that wasn’t so bad.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-big-sequester-gamble-how-badly-will-the-cuts-hurt/2013/02/23/be0c44e2-7c4e-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story.html?hpid=z1
THAT is the worst case scenario?
@Starryflights
And the comment that started this was that “That is a lie. Congress mandated across-the-board cuts on all agencies and left agency management without any discretion in how to go about implementing them.”
So let’s talk lies. after having spent over 30 years managing federal agency budgets, I can say it is a lie (or should we say the nice word, spin) to say there is little or no discretion. Programs may be cut on a pro-rata basis or “across the board” and it deals with the overall program budget. Within those budgets are zillions of ways of managing the cuts.
Some affect the public and some do not. But it is not effective “spin” to identify only the public side of it.
I am no fan of across the board cuts, but in this case, neither side wanted the other to dictate where to cut so it would be shared pain. as it is, there are many exemptions to the cuts.
As an example, I had some occasion to work briefly in the aviation sector. In that agency, there are operations budgets, R and D and infrastructure. So when it came to “across the board cuts”, they did not cut air traffic or safety offices and made the rest of the agency funded under the operations budget to take the hits. If they went after air traffic or safety offices, it was the administrative people subject to furlough not the line employee.
Correction “But it is effective “spin” to identify only the public side of it.”
Well, Cargo, you make an interesting point. How DO we pay for the two wars that were put on a credit card? How do we pay for Medicare part D? How do we pay for the stimulus package that was suppose to help the country claw it’s way out of the hole?
The intent was to stimulate jobs and create more revenue via taxes because because people were spenindg more, buying more, thus creating more jobs. That hasn’t happened. All along we heard the mantra from the conservative right that you simply cannot tax the newly annointed “job creators”. Well that hasn’t worked as well as it was suppose to did it? The wealthy are holding on to their wealth, as is typical, and the middle class keeps shrinking to due stagnation in pay vs cost of living.
Our debt is suddenly a crisis like never before our government spent like drunken sailors, created no new industry, depened on the military industrial complex to support an economy along with a housing boom that was destined to crash and burn.
Now are options to stimulate the economy have to be innovative. We can’t go to war, been there done that for over a decade, we can’t drop interest rates to stimulate housing, been there done that. What do we do to inject our economy with real life? I don’t know. But cutting hundreds of thousand of people from their jobs in a drastic sequestor will NOT stimulate our economy.
Why are they cutting ANY people? The budget is not being cut. It is being INCREASED by 15 billion. The only “CUT” is a reduction in increase. The only reason that the military is feeling pain, is THAT budget was actually cut previously, and the sequester added to that.
How do we pay for the wars? Funny… the deficit was coming down under Bush with both wars in full swing. Apparently the budget was being handled quite well. It wasn’t until Pelosi/Reid wrote the budgets that the spending skyrocketed. They wrote the last budget for the 2009 fiscal year, did not submit it to Bush, and waited until Obama took office to get it signed. Since then, no Senate has submitted a budget, against federal law.
If the intent was to stimulate jobs…. then spending a trillion in transfer payments is not the way to do it. So says Keynes…the liberal authority of money.
And you cannot tax the job creators. But Obama did just that…ObamaCare. The wealthy are holding onto their wealth due to the perceived threats against it. Where is the gov’t advocating free enterprise and entrepreneurship? All that is being done is an attack on the wealthy for an undefined “fair share.”
How do we inject life into our economy? For one thing, enact policies that make fuel less expensive, simplify the tax laws, don’t double tax the corporations, forcing them to move overseas, think outside the box. One idea, back in 2009, which would have cost just as much as the stimulus, but would have generated business….a year long tax holiday on all taxes. We would freeze spending, borrow the money, and businesses would have had the money necessary to generate business. It would have provided a jump start.
As for the financial sector, reinstate Glass-Stegal, get rid of Sarbanes-Oxley, and get rid of Dodd-Frank. Right now, the banks are making a free profit. Their deal is that they are borrowing money from the gov’t at 0 % and buying bonds. Free profit. And the gov’t likes that they are buying bonds to finance the debt.
Repeal ObamaCare. Open up interstate insurance. Small businesses won’t be worried about hiring as much. In other words, enact policies that encourage hiring and business and energy development.
None of which will happen while Obama is President.
@Clinton S. Long
I don’t know how many ways, shapes, or forms I can say this, but you arevwrong. Agency heads have absolutely no discretion in how these cuts are to be implemented. The National Review linked above and the democratic budget office also linked above both are in agreement over this. And for good measure, here is the WaPost ally’s is:
“The sequester effectively orders the administration to make across-the-board, indiscriminate cuts to agency programs, sparing only some mandatory programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. It is the result of a 2011 deal forged by the White House and Congress to reduce federal borrowing. It was intended as a draconian measure so blunt that it would force lawmakers to find alternative means of reducing the budget deficit”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/white-house-releases-state-by-state-breakdown-of-sequesters-effects/2013/02/24/caeb71a0-7ec0-11e2-a350-49866afab584_story.html
Local governments cope with uncertainties caused by federal spending cuts
Local governments in the Washington region are struggling to cope with huge economic uncertainties posed by the massive federal spending cuts known as sequestration, which could place nearly 450,000 public- and private-sector jobs at risk, according to one study.
The biggest challenge, officials said Tuesday, is attempting to make financial plans while the national debate over the unprecedented across-the-board cuts could head in either direction: a negotiated deal that averts the worst consequences or an impasse that allows the ax to fall.
Federal agency employment and contracting are the economic lifeblood in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District. If the worst is realized and jobs disappear by the thousands, the flow of money through the local economy could be choked off, leading to more foreclosures, slower growth among businesses and less spending among households.
All of that would greatly affect local governments, where budgets are inextricably linked to the health of the economy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/local-governments-cope-with-uncertainties-caused-by-federal-spending-cuts/2013/02/19/e5d5412c-7abe-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html
While the sky may not be falling, this is close to catastrophic. The prospects are terrifying.
It will be interesting to revisit this thread after March 1 to see if Chicken Little was right.
http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr03/2013/2/11/14/anigif_enhanced-buzz-4144-1360610237-0.gif
@Cato the Elder
Dude! I’m glad I had already put down my coffee.
LOL!
Public Health reductions will have an impact that we all may feel. Wonder how the public schools will handle vaccination requirements. The contaminated steriod problem. Public Health cuts will only be aggravated by loss of jobs. That worries me more than loss of contracting jobs.
Perhaps the most productive thing this do-nothing Congress could do to help the situation would be to furlough itself for a few months.
Without pay, after they remove the sequester.
cargo – How do we pay for the wars? Funny… the deficit was coming down under Bush with both wars in full swing. – only in your own mind – not with the facts. Bush had signed most of the CR’s before Obama came into office. The deficit for the year was already $1.2 Trillion before Obama took office. Look at the facts.
The PROJECTED deficit. Pelosi’s budget was not passed by Bush. It wasn’t a CR.
NOW they are illegally using CR’s.
The last deficit that can be attributable to Bush except for TARP…is the 2008 fiscal year.
The deficit at the end of Bush’s term was about 450 billion.
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/
@Cargo,
What is your point?
What percent of increase?
That is way too low….re deficit. What are you trying to say Cargo…spit it out.
I see major deflection going on. I think what you should try to defend is taking the country to brinkmanship because that is what happened.
The Obama is worse than Bush mantra you are trying to play out is just a deflection.
debt
01/16/2009 10,628,881,485,510.23
01/18/2008 9,188,640,287,930.39
difference – in 1 year – 1,440,241,197,580 BEFORE Obama was ever in office. Facts are a hard thing. The spending was already done.
@Pat.Herve
Try doing it from fiscal year to fiscal year. You are adding in the spending from fiscal year 2009. The numbers you are presenting are after the fact…. showing all spending for the year.
@Moon-howler
My point? I was answering Pat and Elena. And it is obvious what I was trying to say. We paid for the wars. The deficit, with two wars, was running at about 450 billion in fiscal year 2008. Then Pelosi and Reid jumpstarted their spending in fiscal year 2009. And did not submit that to Bush. Obama signed it and the budget was applied retroactively to the beginning of the fiscal year. THAT is when the 1.2 trillion dollar deficits started. The only other spending that Bush did that eventually push up HIS TOTAL was that TARP.
I still wonder what your point is. Actually, your implication is obvious.
We paid for the wars? With what? We havent even finished paying for World War II.
@Moon-howler
As for the brinksmanship…it takes two. The Democrats were playing it just as much….they should have compromised to match the Republicans by cutting their spending.
I know what happened. Any attempts on your part to slap a halo on those Republicans who continually blocked raising the debt ceiling is just tiresome and deluded.
@Cargosquid
You can look at any date sequence you want – the Debt went up under Bush – as did the deficit. Yes, he had some good years, some good tax revenue – but HIS spending went up.
Debt –
09/30/2008 10,024,724,896,912.49
10/01/2007 9,062,552,400,356.63
Debt Increase – 962,172,496,556
Can you tell me what the big Obama spending was on? And, please do not include the automatic stabilizers that are in current law, and he has no control over.
@Moon-howler
As is your continual apology for the Democrats that also were involved. If the Congress would do their jobs, we wouldn’t be in this fix. The Conservatives are the only ones trying to stop the unsustainable spending. Besides, they were just following the footsteps of the Democrats that derided the raising of the debt ceiling under Bush….
@Pat.Herve
I didn’t say the debt didn’t go up. I said that the deficit was about 450 billion. And that was an increase from the year before.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-10-07-deficit_N.htm
“The federal budget deficit hit a new record in the just-completed 2008 budget year under the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.”
“The record $438 billion shortfall for the budget year that ended last week is up from $162 billion posted last year. The previous record of $413 billion was posted in 2004.”
Are you including said stabilizers under Bush?
I too would like to know where 1.2 trillion in deficit spending went under Obama and continues to do so.
Since we seem to have different numbers, and the claims of about 450 billion in 2008 comes from multiple sources…..we need to know what else went into your numbers besides Bush/Congress’s spending.
what went into my numbers? The Debt – http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/NPGateway
What happened to Obama is that the automatic stabilizers (unemployment, medicaid, TANF,etc) went up, at the same time that revenue went down – revealing a massive deficit with no increase in spending by anyone. It is the way it works – when the good times were rolling, the R’s and Bush admin chose to slash revenue – increasing the deficit – instead of paying it down in the good years. Now, in the lean years, when spending goes up according to law – they all cry about the spending. The deficit would have been $1.2 trillion in the first of office if McCain had won – the same as it was for Obama.
@cargo, there you go again…..trying to say well someone else did it. It doesn’t matter what other democrats in another life or another congress did or didn’t do. It really has nothing to do with what happened in July 2011.
That simply isn’t true.
Who do you mean when you say “conservatives?” Do you mean tea party-ites? All Republicans?
@Starryflights
“I don’t know how many ways, shapes, or forms I can say this, but you arevwrong.” So we have a disagreement so I have to be wrong. Let’s put this in a simple perspective.
You are misreading the word “program” in all of these things you cite. Within each program, there are quite a few cost centers that added together represent the cost of the program. The budgets of the US only go to the program level and not to the cost center level. So within the programs you can defer any cost center except those that are absolutely required to operate and even some of them can be deferred.
So XYZ program gets $10 that includes direct (including vacant posiitions) and indirect costs (like new technology, funding of travel, etc.) at let’s say 80-20 split. So you have to take a 5% cut. Do you automatically furlough everyone so you can buy a new computer or do you let everyone hire their vacant positions and let others go? What do you tell the public? You tell them that these nondiscretionary cuts force you to furlough or fire people which means that there will be this disastrous impact to the public.
If you are told that you have to take a 7% cut in family income, do you tell the family that they won’t eat twice a week or do you tell them that they have to get by on last year’s clothing?
Did you know that at one time an office in an agency provided each employee, even people who had to meeting to attend or make notes about, with a Franklin planner paid for by agency? They cost about $50 each initially at the time and annual replacement pages cost about $20 each per year. So they spent $millions initially and paid hundreds of $thousands maintenance. So do you think they would furlough the people or stop paying for planners?
There are also millions of dollars spent annually on travel budgets. Do you halt travel and rely on telecommunication or do you fire people–or maybe reduce benefits to the public?
This sequester was started by the Obama administration to keep feet to the fire and embraced by his party in the Congress. The opposition saw great benefit in the process since there would be finally some real spending cuts even if painful.
They were both right and wrong. It should have played out as intended which was to force real discussion. Well, it did result in raised taxes, now it is spending’s turn–both sides agreed to this when they tackled taxes first.
Why is anyone shocked that we are here due to the absence of a real effort to deal with fixing the spending side of the sequester by proposing specific cuts to talk about (and yes I mean the Obama administration). The opposition already has its position which is to let the sequester happen, it is up to people who want to change it to suggest where it can be made more intelligently. There is no incentive for the opposition to negotiate with itself.
Obama didn’t start it. It was legislated.
It was supposed to be so awful no one would let it happen. Afraid the reality is, some folks just don’t care.
in our area we also have to look at all the defense contracts and the people with one degree of separation who will lose their job.
Typo again–rats–it should be “even people who had NO meeting to attend”
So let’s see how good the managers are in the executive branch in managing their resources.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BUDGET_BATTLE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-02-26-07-22-56
Obama refuses to accept plan that would increase his and his Secretaries flexibility and autonomy on the sequester.
He must like it just the way it is.
In the Republican-controlled House, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said he’d already done his part, complaining that the House twice passed bills to replace the cuts with more targeted reductions.
“We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something,” Boehner told reporters.
Senate Democrats have prepared a measure that would forestall the automatic cuts through the end of the year, replacing them with longer-term cuts to the Pentagon and cash payments to farmers, and by installing a minimum 30 percent tax rate on income exceeding $1 million. But that plan is virtually certain to be toppled by a GOP-led filibuster vote later this week.
30% tax rate? Is this on top of the tax rate they just did? Because 30% is lower than what they are paying now.
@Pat.Herve
What also happened to Obama is that he signed a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit budget when he took office which was passed by Pelosi/Reid for the 2009 fiscal year.
Would that have gotten signed by McCain, if he had won? Would they have even written the budget like that if they thought McCain was going to win?
As for the lower revenue, that’s when you cut spending. If you have less money coming in, you spend less. You don’t increase it by 5% Other Presidents had recessions. They didn’t try to fix it by spending money. They cut taxes. And it worked. Now they SHOULD have cut spending. But Congress and the President ignores ANY macroeconomic theory. Its always spend spend spend.