Look, when I feel you are debating with honest intent I will put a little more thought into my replies to you.
As it stands, you:
Void my entire argument with some handwaving
Say I ‘..sound like fox news spinning myself dizzy…’
You know what else was supposed to be temporary? Social Security
I have to wait until you deem that I have ‘honest intent’ before you’ll consider me worthy of replying to? Jeez.
Is that reasonable to you?
Just trying to get an idea of your concept of reasonable at this point.
Not at all, you don’t need to wait for me to deem your posting reasonable but surely you can look at your first reply to me and see that your personal attacks at me instead of my argument has put me off.
I would be more than willing to start anew.
What personal attacks? I criticized your argument, not you personally. Saying that your spin in this thread on the Bush tax cut expiration being a revenue gift to the Democrats in this unrelated later negotiation sounds exactly like what is heard on fox is hardly a personal attack. Its an observation.
Ok then, so what revenue increases have the republicans given to Obama and the democrats since the sequester? You can’t count a planned tax cut sunset as something the republicans gave the democrats because they would have expired no matter what happened, even if noone in the congress showed up to work. And actually the revenue gained would have been greater if no deal was made at all, so who conceded what to whom in that fight again? Sounds like the republicans got a better deal than if they would have actually done nothing. So demanding 100% cuts at this point is not a reasonable compromise because the Republicans have yet to concede anything to the other side, and it looks like they will continue to refuse to do so. Reasonable? Not by any commonly accepted definition of the term.
The gridlock is the Senate will not work within a budget.
The Republicans did not want to raise the taxes during a recession. This was their compromise and it was with the understanding that the Senate would then work on a budget with the increase in taxes. The President still wants to increase taxes.
The United States credit rating has already been reduced once and countries are abandoning the dollar. A 2010 UN report argued that the dollar was too unstable to serve as an international standard currency. Cite.
Both the House and Senate passed budgets this year. Is gridlock over yet?
And please explain to me your detailed views on why a congressional budget resolution is more important than the Budget Control Act of 2011. Seriously, explain.
The Senate’s budget required a trillion dollars of additional taxes.
How can anyone debate with you when you can’t even accurately recite even the most basic facts about the issue?
First, the Budget Control Act was passed in July 2011. That set up sequestration. No tax increases were involved. The supercommittee failed in November 2011. In late December 2012 there was an agreement to postpone sequestration by six months, primarily because of a small increase in the marginal tax rates for the wealthy. Nothing else on sequestration happened a year “or more” ago, during the midst of the presidential campaign.
I’ve asked many times on this board for cites that “liberals” agreed not to pursue further tax reforms after the December 2012 vote. I have never once been provided anything. Literally, nothing. As far as I can tell, there’s a conservative talking point that they won’t accept any further tax reforms, and that has morphed into a fantasy that Democrats are breaking some kind of agreement that was apparently not written down, reported on, or ever discussed. I think the true measure of bad faith is blaming other people for violating an agreement that never existed, as far as I can tell.
So to summarize: you’re wrong about tax reform being part of the deal that set up sequestration. You’re probably wrong about something happening a year “or more” ago, since you don’t seem to know what happened or when it did. And you’re wrong about “liberals” agreeing to no further tax reform. You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
For the umpteenth time: MOST OF THE CUTS HAVE NOT ACTUALLY COME TO PASS YET. They are being phased in over the next couple weeks to months. Also, why are you ignoring the stories about doctors and Medicaid services for people with cancer? Do you simply not believe it, or you don’t care?
Did Kozmik suddenly walk into this debate with his trademark short, cryptic statements?
I’ll rephrase the question: what would budget resolutions have done over the last two years that the Budget Control Act didn’t do? Are you aware that budgets are not law?
The major effects were, for most people, never going to be immediately felt. If everyone in your city’s tree maintenance department stopped working or were told they had one month left to work, you wouldn’t notice right away. But the damage is there and will start to become noticeable in time. In other words (1) it is easy to take things for granted when things are running smoothly, and (2) complex systems do not respond instantly to change.
Directly to the title question: I have been affected by these budget issues. My actual job wasn’t affected since I’m employed by a financially healthy private institution. But my work definitely was, as I rely primarily on federal money to do science. You won’t feel any effect right away from continued damage to the strength of U.S. scientific research, but it will eventually propagate to Joe American and will degrade how the U.S. stands in the world in 10, 20, 60 years time.
I’ve already said that I know many cuts have not been implemented yet. I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish by repeating it over and over.
Now for my reaction to the stories about doctors turning away patients. You and many other posters have listed many supposedly dire consequences of the sequester. I’ve responded to many of them as time allows; see posts #44 and 51. So have others. But since the “sequester=doom” side prefers to offer links and anecdotes while the “sequester=/=doom” is actually treating the issue with critical thought, it necessarily takes us more time to write our posts.
For instance, in post #35, madmonk28 claimed to have evidence that people would die as a result of being turned away from cancer clinics. However, those of us who actually clicked on the link he posted and read the article found that it said something quite different from what he claimed. Medicare patients turned away from cancer clinics can simply go to hospitals, and Medicare will still cover their treatments. The article does mention the possibility of out-of-pocket costs rising, but it’s filled with the usual wiggle words, as are all the other prophecies of doom surrounding the sequester. (“could”, “may”, “might”, “it’s projected”, “it’s estimated”, “details are unclear”, &c… &c…) So there’s no actual reason to believe that anyone will be denied cancer treatment as a result of the sequester.
While we’re on the topic, let me point out a fact that you doubtlessly know already. Long before the sequester took effect, there were already thousands of doctors who refused to take patients on Medicare and millions of patients on Medicare who struggled to find doctors. Even if patients were turned away because of the sequester, the effect would be small compared to the problem that already exists. Why start complaining about the problem only after the sequester? Were you not weeping buckets of tears for the patients on Medicare (and Medicaid and other government programs) who were turned away years earlier?
And here’s another fact. For many years, both major parties have issued budget projections based on the assumption that Medicare payments to doctors will be slashed in the near future. Inevitably they decide each year to allocate more money in order to avoid those cuts; thus their budget projections are fundamentally dishonest. Why would I trust your party if they’re constantly saying that they plan to do something, while you are trying to scare people with the threat of the same thing.
Let me tell you a story about “federal money to do science”. When I was at Vanderbilt, Heather, the wife of one of my colleagues, worked in the Physics Department. In 2003 the Navy contacted them, offering them money to build a laser with an extremely specific frequency. Heather and her colleagues read all of the relevant research on the issue and sent back a letter clearly explaining why it was impossible to build the laser that the Navy wanted. The Navy responded that they’d wanted Heather’s team to work on building the laser anyway.
Over the next 7 years or so, her team spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. They were not able to build the laser which they knew was impossible to build. That’s government-funded scientific research.
Doubtlessly you’ll tell me that there’s some federal money that actually supports useful science. If so, why don’t we pass laws redirecting money from useless research projects to useful ones?
The only reason I repeat it is that you continually post things which conclude that the sequester warnings haven’t materialized into actual harm. See, for example, the title of the thread and everything that follows.
So is the Internet, which allows us to read all your glorious anecdotes.
And then Val Kilmer discovered that ice is nice and everyone ate popcorn!
I would call that profligate Defense Department spending. The fact that they contracted with scientists is almost irrelevant.
I’m talking about funding agencies whose goals are specifically to advance scientific progress, not to build death lasers. There is tremendous oversight and heavy meritorious competition for this funding. Is something is demonstrably impossible, it’s not going to get funded through these agencies.
Something sounds fishy about that anecdote… I’m not going to say what you claim is false, but if the Navy is going to spend $10s of millions on a procurement, they will most definitely not contract with an organization that says the work is impossible. Unless there is a valid reason, the whole procurement will go through a RFP and a bidding process and I doubt a team would bid while saying the work is impossible.
No, budgets are based on a framework of a finite amount of money. We have cities going bankrupt and that burden passes to the state. We have states running large deficits. Who is going to cover it? The Federal government which is 17 trillion in debt? China? Jesus?
Something’s extremely fishy about that anecdote. That kind of thing would probably be funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and they have grant monitors that show up on a regular basis to make sure that research is proceeding appropriately.
Still, it should be possible to move this from random anecdote by someone with an axe to grind on the Internet to an actual cite. All we need is the ONR grant number and maybe the name of the principal investigator on the grant.