When President Obama, addressed The Business Council in Washington on Wednesday night, he characterized the impending sequester cuts as more of a “tumble downward” than a “cliff.”
Now that he and Congress have failed to reach any compromise to avert the sequester, President Obama still refuses to engage in doom-saying — but he does have an opinion on the matter. “This is not the apocalypse,” he told reporters. “It’s just dumb.” The sequester will result in nearly $85 billion in program cuts over the next fiscal year, amounting to a total of $1.1 trillion over the next decade. Federal financial aid programs stand to lose more than $4 billion.
In trying to characterize the budget cuts as more uncomfortable than disastrous, President Obama said that the across the board cuts, which kick in automatically after 23:59 on March 1, will not have an immediate impact on businesses except for those directly tied to the Defense Department. The President, however, did not hesitate to lay blame for the sequester firmly on the GOP’s shoulders, saying that the sequester is “happening because of a choice Republicans in Congress have made.”
I am by no means a Republican apologist — nor really an apologist for any group, except perhaps Journey (“Don’t Stop Believin’” is just SO darn catchy) — but it seems like President Obama doesn’t seem to remember signing the Budget Control Act of 2011 into law. Nor does he seem to remember that it was the desperation of an election year that brought the sideshow into the Big Top.
To recap, the so-called Congressional “super” committee on deficit reduction, was formed in the fall of 2011, in desperate response to a burgeoning deficit and an impending election. The notion was that by putting some sort of inevitable fail safe in the bill, Congress would be forced to compromise. Well, let’s just say that the bone-headedness of politicians simply cannot be over-estimated.
The committee members were tasked with finding $1.2 trillion dollars in budget savings, to be spread out over 10 years, by midnight on November 23. Instead, they went home in time for Thanksgiving 2011, announcing that the bipartisan committee could not reach any agreement on how the deficit could be shaved. Under the Budget Control Act, which created the committee, the group’s failure to achieve any agreement automatically triggered the sweeping cuts to government agencies and programs during the 2013 fiscal year.
The committee’s wheel spinning waste of time created a diversion while Congress failed to act in any way that might have been seen as jeopardizing members’ own, or their parties’ chances, in the then-upcoming election year. Now that their wide fannies are comfortably ensconced in their overstuffed, taxpayer purchased chairs, Congress can continue to sit on their hands while college students and their parents spend the next year or two (or four or 30) paying for their elected representatives’ lack of backbone. Okay, so I had an opinion. This is a blog, after all.
Well, it looks like this is now signed into place and we should start seeing the fallout in the economy over the next few months. When did our country go from superpower to a frail and faltering economy lurching from one economic crisis to the next?
This Year’s Subsidy to Wall Street is Equal to the Amount of This Year’s Sequester Cuts -http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-20/why-should-taxpayers-give-big-banks-83-billion-a-year-.html
The only problem with the cuts is that they are about 15-20x too small. $85 billion is nothing more than a spit in the ocean.
“President Obama still refuses to engage in doom-saying” – seriously? The only thing the President has done for the last 3 weeks is “doom-saying” – fireman, teachers, first responders will suffer thousands of job cuts – REALLY – most of those are locally hired – yes I get some Federal money goes to these jobs (unfortunately) – but will this kind of impact really happen from a tiny cut in the GROWTH of spending? And this was only one of his doom-saying snippets. Your future points are spot on – this is failure of both sides to be mature at all. When a family is faced with overwhelming debt they have two choices – keep on spending and go bankrupt or make serious – REAL cuts in spending – not cuts in the growth of spending and yet our elected officials have no guts to do this. Obama ignored Simpson-Bowles, Super Committee turned out to be super ineffective, and the American people, for the most part, are sitting around saying “don’t cut my programs”, but cut someplace else – but at the end of day we have to shrink gov’t, but I don’t think we have the will to do so. So just like the family, at some point the printing of money – equivalent to a family’s credit cards and credit lines – will no longer be an option and the impact on the nation – and much of the world – will feel the impact in a major way.