Speaker Boehner's Powerpoint slides from July 2011, which he used to sell the idea of using sequestration as means of holding the Obama administration accountable. I'm guessing the Obama administration regrets making this deal. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has been unusually silent. As concerned about jobs as she always says she is, you would think she would have something to say about the loss of 700,000 of them on the horizon.
If you're concerned about government waste, consider the time spent by all federal agencies figuring out where they will absorb the cuts when sequestration takes effect. Using the home-balancing-the-budget analogy Congress is so fond of, just as erroneous then as it is now, sequestration is like telling you to decide which children you won't feed.
We live in interesting times. Fortunately, we have plenty of armed people ready to protect us from a tyrannical government and stand up for the right to bear arms by fighting against background checks and gun registration in spite of so many Americans being killed by firearms every year, and whose solution is having more guns. It doesn't appear that Congress will do anything about that either. Perhaps it's more palatable to think of it not as killing, but as a way to thin out our numbers--for our own good.
1 comment:
We should look beyond the sequester, and formulate a bequestor budget.
After the sequester, there will be public blowback. Much of the blowback will come from relatively conservative parts of the population, because of the structure of the automatic cuts. Look for a flurry of new spending bills from both Republicans and balanced budget Democrats post-sequester. Sua culpa bandaids.
But the post-sequester period would also present a political opportunity for reasoned legislation rather than blunt axes and bandaids. We need a bold total rethink of revenue sources and spending priorities, trade and financial regulation, and participatory environmental valuation mechanisms that transcend regulatory cost.
We need to acknowledge that present structures bequeath enormous comparative disadvantages to the young and working classes, for the current profit of the wealthy. We have a generation in power that is busy pulling up the ladder behind themselves, even at their own long term peril.
We need to invest in young people, not just turn them into debtor peons. We need to rebuild the structures destroyed by greedy Reagan-Clinton Fabulism. Perhaps more importantly, we need new economic structures that encode environmental realities.
After the sequester, the bequestor.
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