The White House has created a report on the likely impact of the Sequester in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each report also discusses the national impact of these senseless cuts. You can click on your home state to see how screwed you will be. In Pennsylvania, I can expect $26 million less for primary and secondary education, $21 million less for special ed, $6 million less for environmental protection, $1.5 million less for fish and wildlife, half a million less for public safety, about $9 million less for job assistance, $1.2 million less for public health emergency preparation, $8.5 million less for starving seniors, and $361,000 less for vaccinations for children. About 26,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense will be furloughed, which means that they will not be paying state income tax (or as much, anyway).
Here’s the list:
1. Alabama
2. Alaska
3. Arizona
4. Arkansas
5. California
6. Colorado
7. Connecticut
8. Delaware
10. Florida
11. Georgia
12. Hawaii
13. Idaho
14. Illinois
15. Indiana
16. Iowa
17. Kansas
18. Kentucky
19. Louisiana
20. Maine
21. Maryland
22. Massachusetts
23. Michigan
24. Minnesota
25. Mississippi
26. Missouri
27. Montana
28. Nebraska
29. Nevada
30. New Hampshire
31. New Jersey
32. New Mexico
33. New York
34. North Carolina
35. North Dakota
36. Ohio
37. Oklahoma
38. Oregon
39. Pennsylvania
40. Rhode Island
41. South Carolina
42. South Dakota
43. Tennessee
44. Texas
45. Utah
46. Vermont
47. Virginia
48. Washington
49. West Virginia
50. Wisconsin
51. Wyoming
Thank God we put the Republicans out to pasture in California. I just hope the Democrats aren’t dumb enough to show the “restraint” everybody keeps urging on them. We don’t need restraint! We need a socialist dystopian nightmare, with horrors like high speed rail, clean energy, and free wifi for all!
But even if your are going to be restrained, I would hope that a basic axiom would be that to the extent that the Republicans succeed in strangling the federal government, the state has to pick up the slack. I don’t think there’s anything unrestrained about restoring government budgets to where they should be.
Impossibly irresponsible.
The amount of money and time wasted with each of these (hopefully) dry runs to prepare for disaster is the unsung hit to our economy. Across this country people, businesses & govt are spending time in meetings to determine how they will survive while plans to grow and prosper are put on hold. And then put on hold again.
Hopefully, every government contract with Koch Industries go unpaid during the sequester.
FBI and other law enforcement
–
The FBI and other law enforcement entities would see a
reduction in capacity equivalent to more than 1,000 Federal agents. This loss of agents would
significantly impact our ability to combat violent crime, pursue financial crimes, secure our
borders, and protect national security.
Since when?
Thanks for the read. We are screwed.
This report is a clever political move by the WH. It provides local media with prepared material that they will surely report, thus making an end run around the Very Serious journalists in DC who would prefer we didn’t see the carnage.
It’s good to list this.
But somehow the Democrats need to do a hell of a lot better job of getting the message out that this isn’t a “both parties do this” – it’s GOP blackmail pure and simple. Yes, I know that all of us political junkies get that, but the low information voter doesn’t.
The essence of a failed state is that the central gub’mint possesses no effective enforcement powers and has no actual ability to influence or challenge the misdeeds of local and private actors. The stated goal of our “conservative” nihilists is to create a failed state. They are succeeding.
As a result of Boner’s Boneheads, our national legislature is now completely (and apparently permanently) paralyzed. We essentially have no legislative branch any longer. By refusing to fund basic gub’mint operations, they have now ensured that (already weak) executive enforcement ability will increasingly cease to exist in any meaningful sense, particularly in the environmental area.
The efforts of the national corporate media are now focused on protecting the Nihilist Party from being blamed and to turn public anger toward the executive branch, since the feeble federal power that existed up till now was all the stood in the way of complete control of the country by corporate/plutocrat power.
Whoever the hapless no-info public ends up “blaming” is largely irrelevant in the current environment of an election “system” rigged by plutocrat power, and will not reverse the fact that federal enforcement power has been effectively wrecked by the Nihilist Party. Once a central gub’mint has lost its enforcement powers, they are extremely difficult ever to restore or reclaim. So we are now on the classic path of the failed state, which is exactly what the “conservative” movement has sought for decades. They are winning, and there seems no way to get at them. Certainly Obama and the Dems have not found a way. They hardly can even declare the Nihilist Party is responsible!
Once a nation enters failed state status, it is extremely difficult to guess where it will go next. Some (most?) implode entirely into local/regional sub-fiefdoms, others have a severe counter-reaction and set up an all powerful central dictator figure, usually from the nation’s authoritarian rightwing (ala Putinism).
This sudden reduction in government could have an effect on the influence of the Chamber of Commerce. Why would anyone pay a fee to an organization which supports legislators who destroy your business?