I honestly can’t figure out what this means.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Me neither. It’s word salad. It seems that the underlying “premise”, is that both sides agree that the automatic cuts from sequestration are too much, and need to be modified. I’m sure they’ll find plenty of “savings” for the MDC and law enforcement. The question is how much more will the crazy caucus demand in cuts to social programs? I don’t know how you “think small”, with a problem of this magnitude. Then again, Ryan is a small minded thinker when it comes to budgeting. Getting his party to agree to revenue increases will be next to impossible, even if the Democrats are dumb enough to agree to entitlement reforms. We need a war tax to pay off the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures, and the tax cuts made permanent by Obama need to be clawed back to some extent. That’s all I got.
Exactly.
It’s word salad.
It says a lot, but it doesn’t get to the mechanics of anything.
Does it need to?
“Both sides do it.”
“Opinions differ.”
“Complicated issues are at play.”
It could be a mistake to think of the story as “news”. You might try looking at it as a form of negotiation in the press, happily facilitated by the Times writer enjoying the exclusivity of his interviews; “reasonable” Republicans lay out their starting positions for the deal that cuts out the Tea Party. Pay less attention to Ryan, who is merely a scarecrow, and more to Cole and Kingston.
Well, I’ll give you an example.
The National Institutes of Health, in response to sequestration, deferred all cuts to intramural funding (anything that pays for operations at Bethesda). Therefore, the 7-8% cut to appropriations was applied as a ~10% cut to extramural funding (competitive grants given to principal investigators at research institutions). The NIH is divided into about a dozen institutes, each in charge of a different type of research (Cancer, Childhood Development, Drug Abuse, etc.) The heads of the institutes were given discretion to apply the cuts as they see fit. Many, if not all, decided to cut the size of grant awards. Meaning, instead of getting 200K per year, a principal investigator would take 180K or so.
Now, because NIH funding stopped scaling with inflation roughly five or six years ago, that put a lot of investigators in a tough spot, being unable to continue paying their staff. Now, like any business, you can shift costs — maybe discontinue a project and reassign a person here and there — but that’s a short term fix. If the money doesn’t come back, you have to start letting people go. Moreover, the nature of grants – fixed awards given quarterly over the course of 3-5 years – meant that you’d only start seeing effects a little ways down the line. Well, now we’re a year+ into the sequester and people are starting to lose their jobs, and some investigators are even losing their labs.
This happens in even the best of times, but not we’re seeing it on a massive scale.
Same thing happening with NSF grants.
I used to feel sorry for her. Not anymore.
I’d sure love to “find” half a billion dollars.
Well, if it’s true that both parties agree that sequestration has to end, it makes the big picture pretty simple: overall government spending must increase. You obviously can’t cut your way out of a sequester, although I wouldn’t put it past Paul Ryan to try to obfuscate the fact that the sequester itself is nothing more or less than a bunch of huge arbitrary budget cuts.
And so, given that both parties putatively agree that spending must increase, the only other question is whether to pay for it or not.
Wasn’t the point of Gene Sperling’s speech the other day to advocate cuts to Social Security for short term ‘investment’? I’m glad Harry Reid doesn’t share Sperling’s attitude.
Yes!
Now THAT’S scary!
Best I can make out, it means that the very best we can hope to do is slow the bleeding somewhat, so long as the GOP has significant influence in either house of Congress. Until one party gets total control over the executive and legislative branches, we’re stuck in a state of permanent half-assed government and temporary fixes.
I used to entertain some hope that the GOP would regain control of its crazy wing, that the fever would break and we’d all be able to start stumbling in a forward-ish direction again, but it seems increasingly unlikely.
We’re not simply facing a problem created by bad ideas. This is much deeper. We have a sizable portion of at least one generation of Americans whose intellectual development is so stunted that literally no outcome or experience will shake their superstitious political, social, and economic beliefs. No matter how many times they smash their heads into the wall, they walk away bruised, bloodied, and convinced that their failure lies merely in not having charged it hard enough.
I don’t think you can fix that. Whatever else can be gleaned from this article, it’s clear that the “normals” in the GOP have no illusions about the situation, and absolutely no idea what to do about it. The whole party has been Boehner’d: unable to take charge, yet unwilling to let go of the reins.
Sequestration in all likelihood will proceed as scheduled, and the Teh Partiers will cheer. Then, when things begin to really suck, they’ll conclude that the problem is we didn’t cut enough, and down and down that road we’ll continue to slide…
It can be an error in judgment to think of the actual tale as “news”. You would possibly try out considering the idea as a type of settlement inside press, enjoyably triggered through the Times copy writer making the most of the actual exclusivity associated with the interview; “reasonable” Republicans formulate their particular beginning positions with the work that will reduces out the actual Tea Celebration. Fork out a lesser amount of awareness of Johnson, who’s only a terrify crow, and more to be able to Cole in addition to Kingston.
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