Sequestration

Is this going to fuck up the economy more than we realize? I find it worrisome how cavalier our supposed leaders are being about this. I'm tired of this game of chicken that the GOP keeps playing with OUR economy. It's really starting to create a sense of helplessness. We are completely at their mercy and I don't fucking like it.

• The media keeps saying that the public is not to worry, so I'm worried.

• Take a Klonopin, MARY. It's like 0.5% of GDP. And it's the only way we'll ever cut the fucking DoD.

• The GOP will broker a deal last minute like always. They will NEVER allow the Military Industrial Complex to be harmed. They don't give a shit about the New Deal programs but the military MUST be preserved at ALL times with them.

• The DoD = Republican Welfare.

• [quote]The GOP will broker a deal last minute like always. That's what worries me -- what else will Obama give away...

• Anyone who thinks this is only one party's fault is a moron. Both sides are at fault.

• I started a sequestration thread about a week ago and I was surprised by how few people were concerned about it considering how many facets of our life it will impact. I know a lot of people are down on the DoD but they employ a lot of people and all of those people having a 20% pay cut if they get furloughed is going to be a big hit to the whole country, not just the WDC area. That said, I think the bigger issue is the potential government shutdown at the end of March. I think Obama's strategy is to let sequestration happen to give the repubs (and especially the tea baggers) a little taste of the cuts they so desperately want just to see how they like it. Powerful interests like defense contractors and going to be screaming and yelling at them to turn back on the spigot, so they may be forced to compromise in some larger budget deal. I'm worried, however, that the impacts will be slow and people won't put pressure on Washington to act - so they won't. I'm thoroughly disgusted about the whole thing but I think it's going to happen.

• John Boehner’s home state of Ohio will see a loss of $25.1 million in education funding, as well as $1.7 million in job training and over $800,000 that provides meals to the elderly. Virginia, the home of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, will lose $14 million in education funding, $1.2 million that provides meals to the elderly, and $348,000 for job training and placement assistance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will see his home state of Kentucky stripped of $11.8 million in education funding, $478,000 for job training and placement assistance, and another $677,000 will be taken from programs that provide meals to the elderly.

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• Boner, Cantor & McConnell DON'T CARE about those people (primarily the poor) to start with, so whether or not they lose their benefits, education or what have you is of no concern to them. Where I hope it hits is farm subsidies - the ultimate welfare queens - and law enforcement, because those are the kinds of things that get people up in arms. Repugs are by in large so indifferent to the concerns of the middle and lower class that it has to be some kind of public safety issue or something that negatively impacts corporate america to get their attention.

• Nine-eleven changed our world. Even though your pols are ramping this non-event up to existential proportions, they can't get the drones to give a shit. yawn

• r1, the media perpetuates he fear, based on lies created to panic us. A 1% cut of each federal agencies budget will not hurt any of us.

• Notice that none of the cut backs involve salaries of benefits of the 535 we've sent to Washington.

• Sequestration? Isn't this something to do with the horse meat scandal?

• What is sequestration? It's a series of automatic, across-the-board cuts to government agencies, totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The cuts would be split 50-50 between defense and domestic discretionary spending.

• Why does this seem familiar? It started with the 2011 standoff over the U.S. debt ceiling, when Republicans in Congress demanded spending cuts in exchange for giving the Obama administration the needed legal headroom to pay the federal government's obligations to its bondholders. In the end, Congress and the administration agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts. About $1 trillion of that was laid out in the debt-ceiling bill and the rest imposed through sequestration -- a kind of fiscal doomsday device that Congress would have to disarm by coming up with an equal amount of spending reductions elsewhere.

• What were they thinking? The plan was that a special congressional panel, dubbed the "super committee," would find a less painful way to cut spending. It failed in November 2011.

• Where will the cuts fall? More than $500 billion will be cut from the Defense Department and other national security agencies, with the rest cut on the domestic side -- national parks, federal courts, the FBI, food inspections and housing aid.

• So now what? Congress put off the sequester until March 1 as part of the last-minute fiscal cliff deal on New Year's Day. Without that agreement, economists warned that the one-two punch of sequestration and the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts could have thrown a still-struggling U.S. economy into reverse.

• What is sequestration? Sequestration is $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts due to go into effect over the next 10 years, with roughly $85 billion slated for this year. Make no mistake, a lot of people in both parties want to cut spending. The reason so many people hate sequestration, though, is that agencies and departments don’t have any input on how it goes into effect—the spending cuts are implemented across the board.

• Whose idea was it anyway? It’s been widely reported that the idea for sequestration came from Jack Lew, who was Obama’s budget director at the time and went on to become his chief of staff and is now his Treasury secretary nominee. But to stop there misses the point, many argue.

• Just let the cuts happen, nobody is going to die from it. Life will go on.

• So. Much. Lying. - shame

• So a bunch of overpaid government workers will have to serve on a jury and spend time sequestered in a hotel room. Who cares.

• No one will die if they are furloughed for a day or two, especially when it'll benefit the entire nation.