The New York TImes editorial board isn’t taking Republican hypocrisy lying down. With the sequester beginning to impact air travel by causing flight delays, John Boehner and Eric Cantor took to Twitter to blame the president.
But drastic cuts in spending carry a heavy price. Republicans certainly don’t want voters they care about — including business travelers and those who can afford to fly on vacation — to feel it. They continue to claim that the $85 billion in this year’s sequester can be covered by eliminating waste, fraud, consultants, and the inevitable grant to some obscure science or art project. And, of course, to programs for the poor.
You don’t see any Republican hashtags blaming the president for cutting housing vouchers to 140,000 low-income families, which has begun. These vouchers are given by cities to families on the brink of homelessness, and about half of them go to families with children.
There aren’t any angry tweets about the 70,000 Head Start slots about to be eliminated, which is forcing some school districts to distribute these valuable services by lottery. Or about the cuts to Vista, which is hurting the program that performs antipoverty work in many states. Or the 11 percent cut in unemployment benefits for millions of jobless workers.
The voiceless people who are the most affected by these cuts can’t afford high-priced lobbyists to get them an exception to the sequester, the way that the agriculture lobby was able to fend off a furlough to meat inspectors, which might have disrupted beef and poultry operations. And what was cut in order to keep those inspectors on the job? About $25 million from a program to provide free school breakfasts.
Wow. So we’re paying for meat inspections with money that was previously appropriated to give poor kids a breakfast before school. That’s a pretty bad choice we had to make there. But it is still better than what the Republicans want to do, which is to take that school breakfast money and give it back to millionaires and billionaires in the form of unpaid taxes.
