So far the Sequester hasn’t been all it was cracked up to be…or has it? We haven’t been hit that hard. We are still sitting in the 9th (is that the number?) wealthiest county in the nation and all my friends have jobs who want one. It also hasn’t hit Fairfax or Loudoun Counties. So what’s all the hoopla over?
The Sequester for 2013 is hitting the invisible folks. Those folks we just don’t see. Meals on Wheels has been cut. The Washington Post had an article yesterday about a church who just wan’t going to be able to afford to keep their Meals on Wheels program going. Some of the people were struggling to pay the $2.50 a day for the 2 hot meals brought to them. What will these people do? Many can’t care for themselves. Many can’t afford food at these prices. Most older folks can’t afford to not have nutritious food.
Another area that has been slammed has been Indian Schools. You know, Native Americans. We don’t have to see it. According to the Washington Post:
The public schools on the isolated, windswept Fort Peck Indian reservation here are at the frontier of the federal sequester, among the first to struggle with budget cuts sweeping west from Washington.
The superintendent can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level. Summer school, which feeds children and offers them an alternative to hanging around the reservation’s trash-strewn yards, may be trimmed or canceled.
And in a school system where five children recently committed suicide in a single year — and 20 more made the attempt — plans to hire a second guidance counselor at the high school have been scrapped, leaving one person to advise some 200 students.
“The ones who are supposed to help us the most, hurt us the most,” said Floyd Azure, the 56-year-old tribal chairman, who views the sequester as another in a long line of promises broken by the federal government. “This is disgraceful.”
Few schools in America depend more heavily on the federal government than those on Indian reservations, which have no private landowners to tax. Washington pays about 10 percent of the budget for a typical U.S. public school district; on federal lands, it contributes as much as 60 percent.
While Washington debates the pros and cons of the sequester, the effects are already tangible in Poplar. Even marginal cuts can have a major impact on a reservation struggling with chronic substance abuse, unemployment and other ills, tribal leaders and residents say.
“Five percent isn’t a lot when you have a lot,” said Florence Garcia, the president of Fort Peck Community College, which is looking to close two community wellness centers because of the sequester. “But when you don’t have much, five percent makes a big difference.”
The school system — for which federal funding already had been reduced before the sequester — is looking for $1.2 million in additional cuts, partly by not filling jobs that go vacant. The Indian Health Service, the reservation’s main source for health care, will also be cut by 8 percent, and Head Start, which serves 240 toddlers, will be cut by 5 percent, officials said.
“Instead of trying to cut, we should be adding,” said Kent Hoffman, the vice principal at the high school, who is also filling in as athletic director, another job that will not be filled. “To me, this is insane.”
Now we know who the throw away people are. The United States is still screwing Native Americans and Old People. While the middle class can survive with these cuts, those without much cannot. 5% might as well be 95% in an Indian School or to an old person who is struggling to get buy. Who will take care of these folks?
Are these folks some of the House Republican’s hit list? Let’s get over deficit thinking. Let’s stop thinking the wealthy are exempt. Let’s decide that Indian children and the elderly are just as important as the wealthy.
The House Republicans make me sick.
Want your heart broken?
http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2013/05/23/31926/money-even-tighter-as-indian-country-schools-face/
I have been to Tuba City on the Navajo Rez. My traveling companion and I were the only white faces in town. There was lots of poverty and not much new.
The Rez is miles and miles of nothing in some cases. Many homes don’t have electricity. It’s too expensive for the people to run power out to their homes.
So lets be sure to kick these folks when they are already down. The Navajo Reservation doesn’t profit from gambling, just as an aside. The sad thing about Indian gambling casinos is…the money doesn’t get to all the folks. The wealthy get wealthier and the poor remain poor.
The sequester was Obama’s idea. The Republicans offered authority to shift money to take care of cases like this. The White House declined. Finally, if I am not mistaken, spending in 2013 will actually be greater than in 2012, despite the sequester.
So the cuts experienced by these people are very real, but your hate and blame are mis-placed. Obama is playing games with people’s lives.
It was a compromise to raise the debt ceiling. No one thought it would ever happen. Let’s not play the Obama game. The tea party folks should have NEVER gambled with America’s credit rating by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The money had already been spent.
what would YOU have done? Not paid the military, federal employees and social security recipients? How about our obligations on our debt? Let it go to default?
Kelly, this is a congressional matter. Do you have documentation in a main stream publication, not some rag like Breitbart, that the Republicans??? (which Republicans???) offered authorithy to shift money?
Your sole blaming of Obama is misplaced. You have no solutions other than finger pointing.
The Republicans on the super committee to work all this out were all Grover Renquist pledgees. They were afraid he was going to primary them.No compromise. What moron put them on that committee when they were pledged to not do anything that raised taxes? (and that included tweaking the tax codes,) What democratic moron didn’t put someone like Mark Warner on the committee?
I am tired of hearing about spending. Let’s take care of what needs to be taken care of. Obviously there isn’t as much waste as some folks seem to think there is.
I know obstructionism when I see it and that is exactly what the debt ceiling stall back in July 2011 was.
The Republicans did indeed offer POTUS flexibility (H.R. 816 Sequestration Flexibility Act of 2013) during the early 2013 negotiations. H.R. 816 passed the House; but POTUS apparently refused to consider it, all the while warning that sequestration would result in serious consequences all over the country. He appeared to be counting on the Republicans caving in under the threat of full sequestration — which they did not.
The POTUS signing of H.R. 933 in late March (26 March, I believe), a continuing resolution to fund the USG through the end of the fiscal year 2013, did give the Administration considerable flexibility for sequestration. It gave flexibility to Defense, Veterans Affairs, DOJ, Agriculture, Commerce, State, and possibly some other programs. They were allowed at their discretion to move money between programs if needed. The FAA was given that break earlier in a separate agreement between Congress and POTUS so that air travel would not suffer big delays.
What’s wrong with this picture? 1. The President has a name. 2. THE Republicans? Do you mean the House Republicans? Shouldn’t that be a bill before Congress? Did it ever make it out of committee? Since when does Congress negotiate with the President regardless of who he is?
The Congress makes the laws. The President enforces the laws.
I notice that Congress made it easier on themselves regarding the air travel. They are mostly selfish bastards who want to get home to lie to their constituents. How convenient. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the American public.
Surely the right wing rags aren’t trying to pin the sequestration all on the Prez? Bwaaahahahaha. The timeline tells another story.
HR 933 also gave sequestration flexibility to the Department of Homeland Security.
The sequester idea had merit only as a complete hell scenario that no one would accept. As it turned out, both sides accepted it. One of the particularly grievous harms of sequester is that it applies a braking effect to economic growth precisely at a time when the beginnings of recovery were discernible. It is, in essence, a pro-Recession measure. Because the cuts are general and not targetted, the negative economic (as opposed to programmatic) impacts take hold over time and will be impossible to unwind. Sequester forces a hobbling economy to carry around an anvil during a time when it might otherwise be beginning to walk and run again.
It should have never gotten to this. I take it back to the debt ceiling debacle which was grover Norquist posturing and simply stupid. I am still angry over it. Any time I lose money I am angry.
The sequester has put politics before people, their pocketbooks and their portfolios.
O.K. POTUS — a very common acronym for the President of the United States, used frequently in a shorthand way, especially inside government, and with no negatives attached to it whatsoever. H.R. 816 passed the House: That means it was a BILL which passed a House controlled by a Republican majority. It seems not to have seen the light of day in the Senate. Media reporting at the time was that POTUS put pressure on the Dems in Congress to kill it because he did not want it. That kind of action is NOT unusual from any President.
According to my research, HR 816 did not get out of committee and that was as of Feb. 25, 2013. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr816#
If you have documentation that shows it got out of committee, please share.
I believe the president wanted congress to get rid of the sequstration. Good for him. Most normal people want careful thought to go into budget cuts, not accross the board slash and burn.
After a second look, I have to say that it looks like you are right and I was wrong about actual passage of HR 816. It was submitted by Rep. Ribble (R-WI) on 25 February and went to the budget committee. It appears to me now like it got shunted aside in favor of the flexibility measures embedded in continuing resolution HR 933, which was passed by House and Senate. It also looks like I misinterpreted a Ribble comment to read passage of HR 816 when it was really the passage of HR 1765 Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013 to which he was referrring. You get a +1.
I just wish there were no sequester. Our congress can do better than this.
I am glad to see some of the newer elected folks trying to work on compromise rather than polarizing.
BTW, I am not apposed to reducing flight delays. Flying is enough of a mess without that. I can’t stand to fly now.
What happened to the Native Americans in all of this? I grew up in Oklahoma (Home of the Red Man) and while there were a few Native Americans in my home town, there weren’t many. Some were rich, some were middle class but almost none were poor and none lived on a reservation. I do not have much sympathy for reservation “Indians”; yes, we put them there but in many places Native Americans have assimilated and gotten away from the federal dole. To me it seems very little has been done by the Native Americans to improve their lot except for those who have built gambling casinos on their land. But I’m not sure that is the real answer. Do I have an answer? No.
And the situation isn’t much different, or in many instances worse, in other places around the world where aboriginal peoples still exist. If you are really interested, take a look here at what is happening to other aboriginals: http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes It ain’t pretty. But as I noted, I have no answer and apparently the federal government doesn’t either.
@George S. Harris
The Indian issue is microcosm of what happens when the ‘Julia’ generation happens again, and again, and again, and so on… Plantation politics. Not only has nothing been done about it but its grow exponentially. Why? Cause they will never vote any other way. I don’t know of any better way to secure a voting base. Democrats are pure, unadulterated experts at it.