I think that lesson was well learned Hentor - there will be no more debt ceiling negotiations. It’s clean bills or government shutdown at this point. And the GOP refusing to budge on sequestration will only help build the political narrative when they go whole-hog and shut down the government entirely in a few months.
This is actually the ideal result. Naturally, Fox and MSNBC will be running around trying to whip up atrocity stories to feed their bias, but the folks who get their news from there are already on the crazy train, so it probably will not matter.
This is one reason why the GOP can never allow the return to pre-80’s levels of taxation. After a few years when the economy is still fine even though we’re not polishing John Galt’s knob, that whole scam collapses.
Meh. With the Mets it takes 162 games. I’m used to it.
Right, right - just because the proposal originated with the White House is no reason to blame the White House for the proposal.
This is just bizarre. This is double-think. It’s his idea, but he isn’t responsible for it. The PolitiFact cite that says his claim that it belongs to Congress is Mostly False means that it is Mostly True.
War may not be peace yet, and freedom isn’t slavery, but ignorance is certainly strength when it comes to the federal budget.
Regards,
Shodan
Congress decided it was a good idea, passed it, and hasn’t replaced it. Why is anybody supposed to care who came up with it at this stage?
So far we have Shodan and Kearson buying the “It’s all Obama’s fault narrative”. The evidence for Marley’s claim that it’s only Republican partisans buying it is growing by the hour.
To add some clarity: the Politifact claim is Obama saying that “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.”
That claim is obviously mostly false. Nobody is claiming that it isn’t mostly false. That is, of course, orthogonal to the claim that the sequester is something Obama caused, or supports, or is responsible for. It was the White House’s idea to avoid the calamity of a debt rating downgrade and a cudgel to perhaps goad an intransigent Congress in to doing its job. Congress failed, yet again, and here we are.
Just because the proposal originated with the White House as a crappy compromise to prevent the Republicans from forcing the United States to default on its debts is no reason to blame the White House for the proposal.
It’s one thing to talk about whose idea the sequestration was. But the more important question is “Whose fault is it?”
The linked article on the F-35 is crap as well. I’m not exactly the most ardent supporter of the F-35 program or military spending in general, but the author of the article also managed to cram several glaring inaccuracies in his piece. No one has died in an F-35, the oxygen system problem happened in the F-22, not the F-35, the US won’t have 15 times(!) as many planes as China if the F-35 order is filled, the F-35 doesn’t lack the weapons systems to adequately support ground forces… the article is full of basic factual errors.
There are two ways to read the two sentences I wrote: one is that nobody is buying that Obama came up with sequestration, and the other is that nobody is buying the idea that this is Obama’s fault just because sequestration was proposed by the White House. In context I thought it was obvious I was saying the latter because I was responding to a post that asked why Obama was being blamed. The White House did propose this idea, but Congress accepted it, passed it to force themselves to make a deal, and hasn’t replaced it. Some Republicans are now saying it’s a good and necessary idea. So how is it Obama’s fault, and why do we care where this thing originated?
I thought that with the Mets it was pretty much over by the All-Star Break.
If Congressional Republicans want to claim that it was all Obama’s idea and they don’t want it, there’s a very simple solution.
Just get rid of it.
Uh, who do you blame for offering it up?
I said this earlier “I can even understand why he did what he did, he figured that the cuts looming would cause Congress to work on it, together. That didn’t happen.” and I still believe that he offered it up thinking that it would cause Congress to move.
He clearly should have kept his mouth and his advisors at the White House out of it if he didn’t want blame to be laid at his feet.
Now that the blame is there, he wants no part of it and that is bullshit.
Now, do I find Congress blameless, of course not. But they didn’t come up with the crappy compromise, the White House pushed that.. Congress is to blame for not fixing the damn problem after the compromise was reached.
Aha! Would you say the same if the tax increases hadn’t happened on the front end? I doubt it.
The White House offered more revenues during the negotiations. Republicans rejected that.
So the White House offered sequestration. Republicans agreed to it. That doesn’t make it ‘the Republicans fault’ or anything, but they agreed to it. If Republicans knew that sequestration was so awful, why didn’t they reject it? They rejected other Obama proposals, it isn’t like Boehner doesn’t know how to say no.
Clearly the only relevant issue is how to avoid sequester. Obama proposed it, both parties voted for it, and here we are.
Let me be sure I get this strraight - 1.5 years ago, we passed a bill that said spending cuts would take place - and no one was prepared for them to actually take place?
Why do we even bother with passing bills/laws anymore?
I agree to all of this with a couple minor caveats. The Democrats also voted on this, right? They are also to blame for failing to fix this before now, right?
But him putting his head in the sand and denying that it started with him is ludicrous, and the people defending his stance are also.
Absolutely and twice on Sunday.
You seem confused about recent history. There was no tax increase deal. The tax deal was to keep the Bush tax cuts from expiring on the middle class, and Obama negotiated upwards on the level at which “middle class” could be said to end.
I’m not going to get into semantic quibbling over whether or not it was a tax increase.
Taxes collected went up.
It’s hardly semantic quibbling. Your argument was that there was a tax-related deal that was already struck, so just doing away with the sequester now would somehow not be kosher. You even made a prediction that I would have not been for just doing away with the sequester if the tax deal hadn’t been made.
But the very obvious net effect of the deal was to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but those making over $400,000.
Without the deal, tax rates would have reverted to pre-Bush levels.
This is not a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of knowing what happened and discussing the relevant issues based on that knowledge.
What was Obama’s the alternative? Fail to raise the debt ceiling and allow the U.S. government to default. If we agree that that alternative was entirely unacceptable, then Obama had to find some kind of compromise in order to avoid a default. And it’s the Republicans who created that situation, by refusing to simply do what needed to be done and raise the debt ceiling.
The sequester is a horrible plan, but compared to a government default it was the lesser of two evils.
The Democrats would have raised the debt ceiling without demanding it be tied to budget cuts. The Republicans refused.