Posted on 02/26/2013 12:42:12 PM PST by SeekAndFind
To hear President Obama and the Cabinet officials he has been steadily trotting out like show ponies tell it, the sequester cuts cannot, must not happen, because we’ll subsequently be hit with all kinds of disasters just short of a plague of locusts. Come on, White House, get it together --- I don't know that the sequester is the best specific way to get this done either, and maybe defense-related spending is getting the short end of the stick, but not even the Department of Interior can manage their devastating, draconian budget cuts, really? It's almost like you're trying to tell us that the Obama administration has discovered the absolutely optimal size of the federal bureaucracy, that everything the government currently does is nothing less than essential, and that the feds know how to spend our dolla' dolla' bills much better than we do --- so those miserly rich people better start paying up their even bigger fair share, stat!
Which is precisely why the sequester is a sort of existential crisis for the federal government: If sequestration happens and, miraculously, we manage to avoid mass calamity, that could present a real problem for President Obama's big-liberal-government thesis that we need to hike taxes even more to pay for all of the ostensibly indispensable things the government does on our behalf, as well as make Republicans’ calls for further, substantive deficit reduction all the more reasonable.
One of Obama’s complaints has been that, by law, the sequester doesn’t afford enough flexibility in the way the cuts are implemented, but Republicans have offered up some possible solutions to that particular pickle — and yet the White House still isn’t even remotely satisfied. I wonder why that could be?
Krauthammer nails it. Via RCP, click the image to watch:
Cutting is always attractive in the abstract but in the details it rarely is because there are constituencies who get affected if you have cuts. But the cynicism of the campaign of this administration is astonishing. The assumption is that somehow at every stage of the expansion of the liberal federal government we have reached a platonic ideal and that if you cut a dollar off that, it’s as if God had devised exactly the size of government America needs and any cut leads to Armageddon.
What we’re talking about here is two cents on the dollar. Every dollar the government spends today, 35 cents is borrowed from the Chinese and others. What is going on here is ending up in a position where we borrow not 35, but 33 cents, and that is going to bring Armageddon. An example of the cynicism of this campaign, is one lobbyist for the liberal causes leading 3,000 organizations in opposing the cuts, who told The Washington Post the following: ‘The worst case scenario is the sequester hits and nothing really bad happens.’
Think of the cynicism of that. The worst case scenario is that the government makes a small, minuscule cut in spending on the way to beginning of a journey of recovery in to fiscal health, and that it doesn’t hurt us, we actually come out of it alive. And, that to them, is the worst case. It means, think of how they are weighing the national interest, which needs a cut in spending and these parochial special interests.
When Clinton signed the Republican welfare reform bill in the 90’s, the left said people would be starving in the streets.
Didn’t happen of course, and they weren’t embarrassed. They still use the same language today if you talk about cutting spending.
Here it is used like this: so those miserly rich people better start paying up their even bigger fair share, stat!
Anyone know? Some jargon I'm not familiar with.
RE: What does this term of speech mean: “stat”
Short form for Statim, which is Latin for ‘immediately’.
Meaning: asap, right away, without delay, pronto.
Well, the Democrats will fight sequestration tooth and nail. And there are probably enough Republicans who will fold.
You can’t get any cuts done with Washington the way it is, and I don’t know what can be done.
I predict they will throw up barricades and close down Interstates 80,90, 95 and 75 on Good Friday and blame it on the sequester.
I also suspect a mass outbreak of Blue Flu and Gloslowitis will hit the TSA over Easter Weekend.
Dangerous, violent illegal aliens are not being released. This I know.
From working with the public employee unions in CA during budget crises, cutting the increase in their budgets would mean that their members won’t be able to demand as big as wage increase and they might have to (gasp) contribute a couple of bucks to their healthcare and pensions. They fight for tax increases and campaign that the poor will be cut off, not enough teachers and police, and the budget cuts wouldn’t do that at all if the unions would give a little. They don’t care about the poor at all.
Krauthammer Derangement Syndrome.
A really sad affliction that results in hurling insults at Charles Krauthammer even when the sufferer agrees with him. The only known cure is a weekend in isolation with Candy Crowley and Rachel Maddow.
Such treatment at this time is, unfortunately, not covered under the Affordable Care Act.
The whole thing is a baby step. Most people will never even know it happened.
Forget the media. We need to portray it as such and make fun of them at the same time.
Obama is choosing the harm. If he cannot manage a miniscule two cent cut, let’s get somebody who can.
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