Monday, February 25, 2013

Op-ed: Sequestration...Obama owns it


Op-ed:
Sequestration...Obama owns it

By: Diane Sori

 

          
Four days and counting until...drum roll please...sequestration!!! 
 
The big bad s-word is knocking at the door, and while most have come to loathe the recently much overused word, most wonder what exactly is sequestration. Simply, it's a general cut in government spending...and in legal mumbo-jumbo it's a term Congress adapted to describe a fiscal policy procedure originating in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985, which is an effort to reform Congressional voting procedures in order to make the size of the Federal government's budget deficit a matter of deliberate choice instead of an arithmetical outcome of a decentralized appropriations process in which the cumulative results were overlooked until it was too late to change them. 
 
Now ain't that all a mouthful, but if you meld the two together into a more manageable easily understood and workable definition, sequestration is simply automatic across-the-board reductions in the rate of increase in government spending.
 
But whether you choose the simple, the legalize, or the melded description of sequestration the bottom line is that unless stopped within the next four days, the Obama administration will impose automatic $1.2 trillion in broad based spending cuts...cutting $85 billion a year through 2021 to military and domestic programs. And yes, those reductions will indeed bring down current deficit spending, but only in the amount of about $44 billion in 2013, reducing what the federal government planned to budget this year by 1.5%, equaling a total 0.5% of the gross domestic product...some cut, huh. Only $44 billion this year, because in its misplaced wisdom (and I say 'wisdom' quite sarcastically), the federal government will still borrow close to $845 billion this upcoming fiscal year.

NOT a smart move...cutting deficit spending on the one hand while borrowing even more on the other hand...but then again NOTHING coming out of Obamanation is a smart move. And cutting spending is NOT an option palatable to Obama anyway as he doesn't think we have a spending problem at all.

NO spending problem (yeah right) yet Obama continuously bloviates and blames sequestration on the refusal of Republicans to raise the debt ceiling in 2011. And while both Congress and Obama agreed to the Budget Control Act, which matched some $2.4 trillion in debt-ceiling hikes with a similar amount of deficit reduction over the next decade, the Democrats still refused more cuts without being able to garner additional revenue from taxes, and raising taxes is NOT something Republicans find agreeable under any conditions.

Nope...raising taxes is NOT agreeable to any of us, period. Yet Obama's mantra to get out of this fiscal mess of his own doing is just that...raise taxes and then raise them some more.

And so it seems we'll be stuck with sequestration which remains a bad piece of legislation no matter how you slice it as it gives legislators a way to avoid personal responsibility for much needed cuts...and I mean cuts to domestic programs (as in the freebies and handouts Obama gives out) but NOT to our defense budget. These legislators must be held accountable even if they suffer politically from doing the right thing. And what's ironic about all this is that sequestration was totally Obama's idea...he proposed it, he promoted it, he owns it, and he used his bully pulpit to push it on the Republicans, but now that it's just about here he's backing away and wants NO responsibility for it.

Typical Obamaspeak...it's everybody else's fault...but hey, in his mind it's probably all Bush's fault anyway.
 

So when all the bloviated smoke clears from all the rhetoric, the fact remains that we must cut spending or we as a country will soon become bankrupt...it's that simple. Yet Obama wants people to believe that you can't cut any federal programs or employees without the government shutting down, and that is simply NOT true as cutting less than 3% of the federal budget, which is all this sequestration will do, will in NO way shut down the federal government.

And if Obama, within the next four days, can't convince Republicans that his sequestration idea (and remember it was his idea even though he's now putting the blame on the Republicans), is indeed a bad thing the cuts will happen. And what will the ramifications be if the cuts do go into effect, for now anyway, is that some military deployments may be cancelled, civilian employee furloughs will be necessary at the Department of Defense, the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Agriculture will reduce some services (but hey, the TSA cutting back on 'grouping and feeling' isn't such a bad idea now is it), and some federal employees may be furloughed, as in asked to involuntarily take off a certain amount of time per week, but that is NOT the same as losing one's job.
 

And this is what Obama is really hanging over the Republicans heads as a threat...Obama claims sequestration will cause 1,000 federal law enforcement officials and 1,500 corrections officers to face furloughs, and that border patrol and customs agents would be furloughed for two weeks, resulting in a reduction of 5,000 officers and agents at points of entry to the United States.
 

But he knew this when he invented and set up this manufactured crisis in the first place. He could care less if our borders are less secure or even secured at all as the more ILLEGALS that come in here the more Democratic voters he garners in the end.
 

So what happens now in these remaining four days...House Republicans have said they will only agree to a deal to avert sequestration if there's a plan in place to cut an equivalent amount of government spending, while Senate Democrats are proposing a plan that increases revenue by closing tax loopholes for the richest Americans...again playing into the class warfare and envy tactics polished to a fine point by Obama.
 

And so it seems a stalemate will most likely be the order of the day as many Republicans believe sequestration may just be the answer to solving Obama's out of control government spending, while many Democrats insist that one million jobs will be lost if the cuts goes into effect...and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But once again I guarantee it will be 'We the People' who will get screwed in the long run whether sequestration is averted or if it goes into effect.
 

Just another NOT happy day in the new reality that is Obamanation. 
http://thepatriotfactor.blogspot.com/2013/02/op-ed-sequestration.html
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