Sequester cuts are a common-sense approach
It’s time for a family budget tightening, and everyone’s getting the first dollar knocked off their allowance. Stop the talk of how “draconian” the sequester is – it isn’t. But even if it was, a broad-based cut is the only fair way to do things if we can’t agree on which spending cuts to prioritize. Now, there’s a point to be made that Defense is getting a bigger drop than the rest, but the doomsayer tactics they’ve used to defend such cuts with promises of apocalypse simply aren’t real. But even if they were real, Karl Rove’s argument – that Republicans should simply give the power to the president to decide what’s important and what isn’t – is absurdly wrongheaded. His “better” sequester strategy would involve some assumption that Obama knows best how to split up cuts, when in reality the White House would just use this as another opportunity for leverage to split their foes. Have Republicans learned nothing from Rove’s other failed strategeries? I’m sure nothing will bolster their standing with their base or the American people so much as seeming so desperate to avoid cutting government spending that they’ll leave the choices up to the president.
The real problem is that no one at Defense or elsewhere really took these cuts seriously. They assumed an eleventh hour solution would arise.
Blowback
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Any chance we could get the House to take another week off?
antipc on February 22, 2013 at 3:48 PM
Below are the amounts spent on defence since 2001 – keep in mind that the Iraq War is over:
2001: $366.2 billion
2002: $421.7 billion
2003: $482.9 billion
2004: $542.4 billion
2005: $600.0 billion
2006: $621.1 billion
2007: $652.6 billion
2008: $729.6 billion
2009: $794.0 billion
2010: $847.2 billion
2011: $878.5 billion
2012: $902.0 billion
That’s a 146.31% increase in defence spending since 2001. It goes hand-in-hand with the overall explosion in Federal spending. In FY2001, the government spent $1.8629 trillion. In FY2012, the Federal government spent $3.7956 trillion. That’s a 103.75% increase in spending since FY2001!
There Can Be No “Sacred Pork” – Defence Cuts Must Be On The Table
Resist We Much on February 22, 2013 at 4:18 PM
I would be willing to replace the sequester with an across the board spending cut of equal or greater value. It’s not the specific spending cuts contained in the sequester that I support—those were arranged in secret backroom negotiations between Obama and Boehner that myself and most tea partiers opposed at the time—but if the ruling class’ backroom swindle is the best we can get, so be it, cut it! Or double the cuts and make them across the board, I wont complain as long as the cuts are made without delay.
The ruling class intentionally made these cuts as painful as they could in order to cajole themselves to compromise, so they claim. Maybe that was their motivation, but I doubt it. Instead of cutting spending the right way, for example through Cut, Cap and Balance as advocated by the tea party, which was the responsible thing to do and would have improved the country, they decided to cut spending the worst way, the most painful way, (according to their own recent protestations about the sequester), but not for the reasons they claim, rather as a weapon aimed at those calling for fiscally sound economic policy. If they had to cut spending they wanted to make people pay so that they’d never try it again.
Well you know what? Tough luck, it was the ruling class plan, not mine. If they claim it’s the tea parties fault, they are lying. We wanted Cut, Cap and Balance. When they refused, I argued they should do a clean debt ceiling hike back in ’11, rather than this crooked deal. Cut it anyway, but don’t blame the tea party, blame the ruling class. Blame Obama and Boehner and all the people on both sides that voted for it.
FloatingRock on February 22, 2013 at 4:59 PM