Today is the day of the the sequester. If no deal is reached, then most federal programs have to take a budget cut totaling 44 billion dollars during this fiscal year. The federal budget, meanwhile, is over 3.5 trillion and will be larger next year even if the so-called ‘cuts’ take place. In the past few budget showdowns, both parties have blinked at the last moment. Perhaps they’ll do so again today. Perhaps not. Somehow I’m managing not to panic.
It’s not just because the Obama Administration has threatened us with cuts to a program that doesn’t actually exist. That’s small fries. Instead, let’s look at the ‘cuts’ to the Pentagon Budget, which are the biggest slice. They’d amount to about 20 billion dollars in the current fiscal year, bringing the Defense Department’s base budget down to slightly below 500 billion dollars. After that it’s projected to continue rising every year for the next ten years. By contrast, a mere 13 years ago the Defense Department budget was below 400 billion dollars and the USA had no shortfall of military capability.
Nevertheless, certain parties assure us that the Pentagon just can’t afford that tiny, short-term budget reduction. One poster on this board recently said that DoD employees are running out of paper. Meanwhile, over the last few years, has spent 15 trillion dollars on an airplane that probably won’t ever fly a single mission. Frankly, if they can waste that sum of money, I don’t think they’re in danger of running out of paper.
The program still exists in the budget because the government is still running off of the FY2012 budget. Congress has, under the continuing resolution, made funding available to a program that has ended, and the White House has no authority to line-item veto the law passed by Congress. Therefore, the White House report is 100% accurate.
The sequester cuts are more like $85 billion, split evenly between domestic agencies and defense.
You’re wrong on the number, as has been stated. You’re wrong on the amount that has been spent on the program. The program has received roughly $56 billion since the mid-1990s. And about 80% of the trillion-plus cost of the program is the cost of actually flying the aircraft over the next half century, so you can’t simultaneously claim that the jet costs that much and that it will never fly.
I’m not sure what the actual question is that you want to debate – I believe the sequester is really bad – but you’ve managed to cram in several glaring inaccuracies in your OP.
It’s still hard to see why we should panic over cuts to a non-existent program. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the sequester would actually take away the necessary money for some useful government function, here’s some money that Congress could easily transfer to where it’s needed.
It’s 44 billion dollars in the current fiscal year, 85 billion over the next 365 days. Both figures represent about 2% of the federal budget during that period.
I can certainly claim that it will fly, but not combat missions. The great majority of what our military does is not productive, but just chews up taxpayer money and gives us nothing in return. The plane in question is just one of money huge wastes of money in the military budget. If our leaders had the courage to cut useless spending from the military budget, we could cut far more than $85 billion annually from that alone and still carry out far more missions than we currently do.
It’s really not the $20 billion cut that will affect the military; it’s in the way the cuts are being made. Existing contracts will not be touched, so the easiest way to make these cuts is to furlough the civilian employees, essentially giving them a 20% pay cut. So now you have this $700 billion/year military ran by disgruntled employees who are struggling to pay their mortgages and bills. The results won’t be good.
There is little doubt that $20 billion can be found and eliminated from the military budget, but the WAY the sequester will enforce the cuts is the problem, not the money amount.
Running the government by CR is incredibly wasteful. I would love to see a grand bargain where we trade elimination of the debt ceiling for elimination of the CR. It’s a wash ideologically and both reforms are needed.
You’re taking one item out of a report that goes on for 158 pages and covers many hundreds of programs, and claiming that people are panicking over that one program? You’re the one playing fast and loose here.
And there is no flexibility for the cuts to be reprogrammed to more worthy programs. Of several problems with the sequester, one is that it cuts good programs unnecessarily, and doesn’t cut bad programs enough.
No, it’s $85 billion in budget authority the current fiscal year which lasts until September 30. The $44 billion you’re referencing is the amount of that money that would actually be paid out during that time.
Let me explain: let’s say you work for the Air Force and you need a contract for someone to take care of the garbage generated on base. You have a $1 million budget for this function, so you award a one-year contract in March to a garbage company. You need all $1 million to award the contract for 1 year of services, even though only half of it gets expended in the current fiscal year. To implement an $85 billion sequester, the government has to made decisions to cut all that money right now, even though the funds would take somewhat longer to actually be spent.
The main reason why the sequester will hurt so much is that agencies have spent roughly half of their annual budget, so they have to take 100% of the sequester cuts against half of their annual budget. That’s a stupid and harmful way to do things. If agencies could take all the sequester cuts against their full year budget, it wouldn’t be as bad.
Furthermore, the talking point that we’re simply cutting 2% of the whole budget is also misleading. All the cuts are taken against one portion of the Federal budget: roughly two-thirds of government spending is immune from the sequester, principally Social Security, most of Medicare, and interest on the debt. Your point is totally misleading. It’s like if I said that I was going to cut $100 from your household budget: that wouldn’t be a huge deal. But if I told you that the $100 was coming out of your mortgage payment, that would be a huge deal: you’d have to either move or risk default on your mortgage. “But it’s just $100!” I might say. Yes, but the harm is caused by where the $100 in cuts is targeted.
But in any case, the Congressional Budget Office long ago estimated that sequester will cause a contraction in the economy and a loss of hundreds of thousands of government and private sector jobs. Why is that a good thing?
And you don’t want to be throwing people out of work in this economy. It’s not good for anybody and it’s not worth whatever longer-term savings it’s supposed to achieve.
Apparently that opportunity came and went. I’d settle for any kind of resolution to this continuing phony crisis because the uncertainty over spending and budget cuts is terrible for the economy.
The cuts have been law since August of '11 and were originally planned to take effect two months ago. The government certainly ought to have been prepared for them and all the departments and programs being cut ought to have budgeted for this fiscal year accordingly. Instead the Administration chose not to do that, and government offices have been spending money at levels which the law says they can’t maintain.
Those of us who are concerned about the long-term trajectory of spending and the national debt want to see some cuts. If Congress voted to rearrange the cuts to something they found more reasonable, I’d shrug my shoulders. The point of the sequester is to show that Congress actually can vote in favor of deficit reduction, rather than the diet of tax cuts and spending increases that took us from a balanced budget to trillion-dollar deficits in less than a decade. If the scheduled cuts were simply cancelled out, that would be as good as an admission that the federal government will never pass real budget cuts, ever.
Oddly enough, I’ve never heard anybody saying that it is a good time to throw people out of work in any economy. If we follow the logic that we can never get rid of a single federal job or part thereof because it’s bad for the economy, then the federal budget will never shrink; it will only grow until we hit a catastrophe, as so many nations already have.
Literally nobody is proposing simply to do away with the sequester. Every proposal I have heard of to delay sequester involves some combination of longer-term spending cuts or tax increases.
In any case, even if the sequester was eliminated this year, the sequester comes back every year from 2014 through 2021 (or something like that).
And let’s also get this straight: the surpluses in the last ninties and early 2000s were not a result of any particular tax or spending policy. I attribute them to having very strong economic growth and full employment. The focus of government policies should be primarily to restore strong economic growth, and secondly to deal with the deficit; because a good economy helps Americans and improves the budget outlook.
It hurts at some times more than at others. This would be one of those times where it’s a particularly bad idea.
That’s not following logic, it’s making up a strawman. (I specifically said “this economy.”) If a lot of people lose their jobs and the economy slows down because of the spending cuts, it’s going to make the deficit worse, not better. This is exceedingly simple and it’s not a secret. If your concern is the deficit, you should know the remedy is a better economy, not spending cuts for the sake of spending cuts.
Still, if the jobs to be cut are things we could reasonably do without–and I’m inclined to think that most of the military contracting jobs are that–then it would make sense to go ahead with the cuts… and spend the money employing other people to do things we actually need (transportation and energy infrastructure, say).
Nothing’s forever, they can always revive a compromise next week, year, or century.
You do start to wonder after a while whether the GOP is deliberately driving the country into a second recession for political gain. Can anybody be truly *that *cynical?
But they won’t. There’s no appetite for that bargain, by which I mean not enough House Republicans support it. That was the case in 2011, and it’s still true.
They decided the debt was their big issue, and they’ve decided spending is the only way they want to address it. I don’t think they’re tanking the economy on purpose, but everything else is secondary to spending.
I don’t see how they’re blaming Obama for mismanaging this thing. I’m willing to blame Harry Reid, but what did the President do? He hasn’t vetoed anything. He can’t pass a compromise. It’s really congress’ job. And the Republicans, if they don’t like it, could introduce a bill to repeal it. I haven’t seen that happen. In fact, I’m not sure either party has simply introduced simple bill repealing sequester.
Congressional Republicans are saying it’s Obama’s fault because his administration proposed the sequestration that they agreed to. Yes, I’m serious, and no, nobody outside of Republican circles is buying this.
Gotta wonder if there’s a GOP member of the sane caucus willing to try for the Speakership with the support of the Dems. There’s a sane majority in the House, I have to believe, it’s just a matter of coordinating it. Don’t see how Pelosi could do it, 'cause she’d always be at the mercy of GOP defectors.