The Republicans crack me up when they complain about the president being political and “campaigning” against them. Here they are, taking a meat-axe to the federal budget, offering to give the president more “flexibility” to wield the axe (so they can blame him for the resulting outrage), and when the administration delays the deployment of an air craft carrier or decides to release a bunch of undocumented workers from detention, they are outraged. “Couldn’t he find the money elsewhere,” they shriek.
Yeah, he could have, but he didn’t because you are acting like assholes. And, in any case, supervised release is more cost-effective than holding people in prison where you have to guard and feed them.
Next right-wing conspiracy? If Boehner won’t negotiate, Obama is sending an undocumented worker to live in your house while he awaits his deportation trial.
What cracks me up about this is work related. I love government jobs. Out of high school I joined the service, and after that did a stint DOD contracting, and now I have been in international development for the past… err… 6 years, it’s been a while.
So most of our budget comes from USAID, and while everyone wants to slash foreign aid, few people realize just how tiny that budget is. You couldn’t fund crap over it, yet everyone always thinks it’s massive.
Also living in the greater DC area where everything is related to government funding people here are furious and starting to panic. It’s one of the reasons McDonnel and local business leaders are after the Cooch and the Tea Party, it will wreck the state.
Should be an interesting few weeks.
See this: http://federaldaily.com/articles/2013/02/25/mspb-braces-for-wave-of-furlough-appeals.aspx
Commenters seem to be blaming Obama rather than the House, but that may be selection bias.
Supervised release of people suspected of illegal entry? Experience has sown that they will melt into the countryside. No, the President chose that and the deferred deployment to maximize the pain of the cuts. Despite people here insisting the the sequester requires 10% across the board cuts in each and every affected activity, it is apparent that the sequester only cuts budgetary appropriations, not activities. Otherwise how do 20% pay cuts result? In fact, Congress does not have the authority to intervene in the day to day operations of the government, that is the provenance of the executive branch, the President.
Let’s take an example. One of the budgetary categories that exist is called O&MN, Operations and Maintenance Navy. This covers Naval operations such as buying the fuel for that carrier deployment, repair of Naval equipment from circuit boards (doubt if they do that anymore) to catapults to radar systems to nuclear reactors, and the pay of Navy civilians (not uniformed personnel, that’s a different appropriation entirely. Within an appropriation, the White House has broad latitude to spend on authorized items, but must get Congressional approval to shift money between pots. That is called re-appropriation and requires a House bill and the whole magilla of the original appropriation.
So the President could choose to not furlough any employees, but to keep ships in port to save fuel instead. Usually, during these crunches, equipment is not repaired and heaps of broken stuff accumulate while ships deploy at less than 100% combat capability. I remember that very well from the Vietnam war.
It’s apparent to me that the President is choosing his cuts to annoy the maximum amount of people without long-term damage. That’s good politics and I’m not criticizing him for it. His hands are NOT tied and he is playing his hand brilliantly and ruthlessly. I admire that.
Well, I think it’s a shame that some way wasn’t found to focus the coming cuts on demonic federal offices and military bases located in the precise Congressional districts that are supposedly so gung-ho on cutting $350 billion out of discretionary spending. Basically, the New Confederacy.
The TeaParty Turds want massive cuts to hated gub’mint, simply to accomplish cuts (however insane and counterproductive the may be)—so let THEIR districts be the main “beneficiaries” of this enlightened and economically invigorating policy….no need to thank us!
To a large extent, they are. The White House put out data on which states would be hit hardest and the south was at the top of the list, with the mountain west and the midwest coming in next. The blue states were least impacted.
I used to live in Arizona, a hotbed of insanity. It gets hit hard. I now live in progressive Washington state. Here, the impact is far less.
The sequester is not targeted at a granular level. Large cities will be heavily impacted. But the loudest shrieks will come from red states. There will be pain all around. Even Congress will feel it.
The most pork-barrelly states are the ones that get hit hard. Guess who’s been posturing about cutting spending and pork barrel the most? The guys who provided cover for TEA Party extremism. Now it’s coming back to bite.
This is the issue I highlighted about credibility of the President’s list of what would get cut coming back as a Republican talking point.
The proper response is that they could have chosen other things to highlight, like things in Utah, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Or in Darrell Issa’s district. Or Michele Bachmann’s. Or Steve King’s. The President does have discretion.
The aircraft carriers were in the district of a Republican who wants the kabuki to end. And the Congressman was on hand to reinforce the President’s message to the House Republican Caucus.
Here’s the problem w/ this assessment. The over confidence of anyone who has invested fully in Obama administration. Everything is a wider 12 dimensional (new improved) chess scheme to “make America more progressive in the future for the ‘little guy’ ” It is never “This was a horrible decision to come bite us in the ass”
The proof is in the pudding. The election was a “scoreboard” moment. Obama didn’t have a lot of options when the sequester was negotiated. Had the Republicans shut down the government, it probably would have prevented his reelection. It was very smart to negotiate this deal, which puts most of the pain on the Republican side of the ledger. Next, he’ll hit all the right buttons to make constituents in those states scream.
Bob McDonnell in Virginia is in a particularly tight spot as governor (thus, having to appeal maintain broad popularity) who relies on Tea Party support (and, thus, maintain his TP cred) while at the same time facing huge military cuts and public sector cuts (in D.C.) that will bring his state’s economy to its knees.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. Republicans in Congress have to defend an unwillingness to close tax loopholes for corporate jets and hedge fund manager income. In the face of real cuts that effect real people, they have to stand against a minimum taxation level on millionaires. Good luck with that.
No question Obama’s in the catbird seat.
Or maybe if the Republicans had shut down the government, we would have a Democratic Congress.
Regarding “loopholes”, the only loopholes being discussed by the talking heads are mortgage interest deduction, state and local tax deductions, and the earned income tax credit. I’d like to hear less about loopholes.
Meanwhile so-called Democrats continue to hammer on the need to bring SS and Medicare “under control”. Maybe Grover Norquist of Michael Bloomberg are funding them under the table.
Sure, maybe we’d have a Democratic congress. Maybe there’d be faeries over the dome and unicorns in the national zoo.
I don’t mean to be flippant. Who knows — maybe a Democratic congress would have been the result. But that’s wildly speculative and there’s no reason to think it likely. I’m not sure why so many on our side think Obama has limitless power. The guy has done an amazing job considering what he’s up against. He deserves way more credit, particularly on our side.
I think it’s wildly speculative to think that the blame would have fallen on Obama and that people would have turned to Romney. In every one of these situations, from Clinton-Gingrich on, the public has (rightly) put the blame on Congress.
Did Clinton win the Congress in ’96?
He had control.
The Republicans had control of Congress from 1995-2000.
They had the majority but he had control. Just like Bush had control of the nominally Democratic Senate.
Whose deportation trial? The worker, Boehner, or Obama? If it’s a wingnut conspiracy, it could be any of the above.
If the President signs a bill that wields the axe, he will deserve some blame, because he continues to spout the premise that the deficit must be reduced. That destructive premise is declared right at the top of the White House’s own papers of what programs will be cut state by state as a consequence of the sequester. This is the time for watching how the spin is being prepared to be spun.
No, it’s smart politics. The deficit does have to be reduced. If we don’t tackle rising health care costs, which is at the very center of the problem, our country will be bankrupted and no level of tax increases will be enough to offset. Obama sees this. Our deficit problem is actually a health care cost containment problem.
Unfortunately, he lacks the power to tackle the problem in its entirety. But he’s putting the programs and institutions in place that can and must be built on over the next generation. He’s very smart and sees the big picture. By contrast, the TPers can’t see past the end of their noses.
It’s a myth that “our country will be bankrupted” if we don’t reduce expenditures down the line. We could cover every penny in forecast cost increases with higher taxes and still have lower-than-average taxes for a developed country. Now it’s true we’d be a lot better off if we cut the waste from private insurance and fee-for-service plans and used the money for something useful – but bankruptcy of the United States is not at issue.
Not true. If health care costs continue to rise at the rate it’s been rising over the last twenty years or so, it will bankrupt Medicare and health insurance will become too expensive for most everyone. The ACA must contain costs. It may already be having a positive impact. But it’s only the first step.
It’s very different to say “We must reduce healthcare costs” and “We must reduce the deficit.”. It’s entirely different messaging. Read the first paragraph of any of the state sequester cuts that he released.
Republicans just want Obama do cut out the welfare payments to undeserving minorities/poors budget. That’s the real problem and it’s like 90-99% of the non-defense budget isn’t it? Obama just doesn’t understand that when the GOP says we have to cut budgets because deficits, they don’t mean the budget for anything that helps people who matter. They mean the skyrocketing budget for lazy poors. They’ve been given to understand that this budget has swollen considerably since Obama’s election, creating our current debt at a stroke.
Pentagon F-35 program chief lashes Lockheed, Pratt
This boondoggle is a program ripe for eliminating. The “partners” are just pigs fighting over the slops. If we need a new fighter it should be designed and built in-house where cost-effectiveness is the design criterion not how much executive stock bonus can be wrung out of Congress.
Contractors were partners in WWII when national survival was an issue. Likewise during the early years of the Cold War when business leaders were worried about a communist takeover. Now they are just welfare queens selling overpriced junk that probably will fail in combat anyway. We need to return to the arsenal system of weapons development that prevailed prior to WWII. The business of Defense should be defense, not profit. But that’s the subject of a lengthy diary.
Part of the problem here is similar to the TBTF banks. We used to have a huge stable of defense contractors who could make planes. They all made really good planes, though some were better in some areas. Same for most equipment.
Well capitalism and markets being what they are and doing what they do, the bigger ones kept eating up the smaller ones. So we have much fewer than we once did, with production placed out all over the place. So instead of tons of bids and prototypes for the planes, in the case of the F-35 there were only two, and production was rigged to hurt every state. And again, markets being markets and capitalism being what it is, they’ve used that to screw over their customers.
The defense industry and even the banks aren’t alone in this, it’s been happening all over the place. Those are just the biggest, and most widely known ones. But if you look at say the tech industry or the food industry, it’s happening there as well. It doesn’t matter who you buy a computer from (apple, hp, dell, take your pic) there are only two brands of CPU, and two brands of graphics to choose from… and most memory is made from very few vendors, and it’s all made off the same plants. Your choice is an illusion, it’s all the same stuff.
The end result is record profits, record sharehold payouts, great stock prices, and insane CEO pay. But screwing the customer.
The only way to claw back anything is to raise taxes.
But, but, but, the Murican Free Market system is The Greatest!
A huge part of “conservative” movement in the early days of St Reagan was eliminating federal scrutiny and enforcement of the nation’s anti-trust laws, which were put in place in the Progressive Era to combat the last great wave of plutocrats and the economy-destroying monopolies they assembled. Indeed, abolishing the antitrust laws was one of the principle goals of the “conservative” (actually corporate) movement. Bork, for example, got his name as a committed opponent of the antitrust laws.
So, 30+ years into the Conservative Era, we now have massive market concentration in virtually every sector of the economy with no meaningful review of mergers by the federal gub’mint, to the immense profit and satisfaction of today’s New Monopolists. That’s “conservatism”—a return to the Gilded Age of Trusts and untouchable Billionaires. Our noble “conservatives” have made a mockery of the “free market” and “competition”, while piously braying that these are Sacred Elements of Murica.
It’s funny, too, that these are the people who like to make a ritual of reading the Constitution at the beginning of a congressional session. Or I should say intoning or chanting the Constitution, since they don’t show any of the comprehension that’s normally associated with the act of reading.
I mean, the language is a bit archaic, but the Constitution is written in English. But for the Tea Party caucus, I imagine the experience of hearing the Constitution read aloud must be sort of like a Latin mass. “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” Presumably all of the current House Republicans have heard that sentence at least once.
With the likely fall of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act today, I am a bit too depressed to really get into this.
Antonin Scalia is a piece of scum. He deserves to die of apoplexy.