Pay for it?! What the …! Isn’t it supposed to save money?
Not. It does considerable damage by slowing growth in the economy.
“Besides having adverse effects on jobs and incomes, a slower recovery would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions.” Paul Krugman, quoting Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.
And, of course, we know that the deficit has been shrinking during Obama’s presidency. I know Republicans either don’t believe that or don’t want to. But I’m tired of reposting the evidence that it is, in fact, true. The right is trying to create the dangerous blow to the economy they say they’re trying to avoid.
What Republicans are doing with the “sequester” is use it as a way of deliberately slowing the economy, as they have been trying to do all along. We just have to sit out this very painful charade they are playing. Unless, of course, we choose to fight back.
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If you look at the actual cuts, you want to bang your head against the wall. Because this damn thing is going to cost and cost and cost. “Just dumb,” Think Progress is saying, and that’s being polite. They go on to get specific about the “dumbest and most painful” cuts.
It’s a long list. I’ve chosen a few, particularly those representing “if you don’t pay for it now, you’ll pay more in the future.”
$168 million cut from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
$928 million cut from FEMA’s disaster relief money
$125 million cut from the Wildland Fire Management [a perilous, stupid thing to do to the Great Plains in the middle of a drought and dust bowl]
$57 million cut from the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control [how stupid can you be!]
$116 million cut from Higher Education [and] $86 million cut from Student Financial Assistance
$512 million cut from Customs and Border Protection
$232 million cut from the Federal Aviation Administration
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What we need to learn from the sequester is this: treat it as a diversion from what’s really going on. We learned that lesson during the Bush administration when the Republicans were also throwing flares all over the place in order to distract us from their real efforts to — for example — start an unwarranted, costly series of wars. Which were also, by the way, where the deficit came from — that, and the Bush tax cuts.
The politics behind the sequester are the politics — the breakups — within the Republican party. That and the continuing effort to tie the President up with invented “crises” in order to keep him from governing. The “do-nothing” Republican House is really about turning the Obama terms in office a “do-nothing presidency.”
One of the highest prices we will pay for the sequester is crippled productivity during two full terms of a Democratic administration.