Sequester 2013

[joan1984]

 The 2013 "budget authority" (no budget has been submitted that Democrats voted for since the 2009 Bush Budget, used as the baseline budget for 2010, 2011, 2012, and to date in 2013) of 3,750 Billion Dollars will be reduced by 22 Billion in Defense Discretionary Budget Authority, and 22 Billion in non-Defense Discretionary Budget Authority, for fiscal year 2013, beginning 3/1/2013.

  Non-Discretionary Budget Authority remains unchanged by the 2011 law.

  The President can assign Transfer Authority to DoD and allow his appointed Cabinet members, Agency Heads, to shift budget items where they believe are most effective,
should he so choose; or the President can specify shifts, or make it across the board.
There are no actual cuts in spending, year over year, only reductions in automatic annual increases in specific budget authority.

  Who believes they will be seriously affected by the reduction in the increase of budget authority which passed in Congress and was signed into law by President Obama in 2011?

[watcher1]

Kind of strange that the President agreed to sequester last year but when the time comes to actually implement it, he is denouncing it.  Ah, politics. Gotta love it.

[Lois]

I don't think either of you have it right.  The below article gets to the truth of the matter in my opinion.

It is Congress's job to propose a budget that that they know Obama will sign. In absence of the President's signature they need to propose a budget that will override a Presidential veto. I don't see them doing either. Rather they are sitting around and whining that they want a budget that won't be approved and they know it. It's like being the party of "no" and holding the country hostage is all they want to be or do.



The Sequester Is Not an Abstraction
By DAVID FIRESTONE, New York Times

President Obama’s plea this morning to avert the $85 billion sequester before March 1 was instantly ridiculed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, as a “campaign event.” That’s presumably because the president spoke in front of a group of emergency responders whose livelihoods are threatened by the indiscriminate spending cuts, just as he often used middle-class Americans as backdrops on the campaign trail.

Fine, the emergency workers were props, just like the people who have filled the first lady’s box at State of the Union speeches for decades. But there’s nothing wrong with the president using federal employees as illustrations, since workers are going to bear the brunt of the sequester’s pain. He could just as easily have lined up a group of federal meat inspectors since they will be going on furlough in a few weeks, resulting in grocery shortages. Or a group of air traffic controllers. Or cancer researchers. Or Head Start teachers. Or prison guards.

All of them will be working less in the coming months if Congress does not avert the sequester, producing backups in their specific fields that will be felt by all Americans, as well as a slowdown in spending and financial activity that will have an asteroid-like impact on the economy. The president is driving Republicans a little crazy by holding these illuminated events, because they vividly undermine the basic Republican tenet that vastly reduced spending is good for society — getting government out of the face of Americans who hate it — and good for the economy.

Cancer researchers are American government, and if Republicans don’t think their work should be supported by taxpayers, they are free to make their case publicly. But they won’t do that, because the various government functions facing cuts are both necessary and popular. Instead they talk in dire but abstract terms about the debt threat, pretending there is no need to ever raise taxes, and hoping that voters won’t remember what their dollars actually pay for.

“This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs,” Mr. Obama said today. “The unemployment rate might tick up again.”

When Republicans threatened to put the government in default in 2011 unless the Democrats agreed to slash spending, they didn’t tell the public what that would really mean, for either regular discretionary spending or health-insurance programs like Medicaid and Medicare. They expected Mr. Obama to specify actual cuts, hoping he would then share the blame for unpopular reductions in government services. And when he came up with the deliberately onerous sequester plan in order to prevent disaster, Republicans readily agreed rather than raise taxes a dime. (Twice, actually, if you count the failure of the “super-committee” for the same reason.)

So it’s ridiculous for Republicans to claim the sequester is really Mr. Obama’s idea, as if a kidnapper’s relatives deserve blame for paying the ransom. (“The President’s Sequester,” as Speaker John Boehner now calls it.) Republicans love the idea of reducing spending but prefer to remain in the shadows when the cuts actually materialize. Even now, they won’t consider the Democratic alternative of balancing cuts with an equal amount of higher tax revenue from the rich and corporations, preferring instead diversionary rhetoric like this today from Mr. Boehner:

“To keep these first responders on the job, what other spending is the president willing to cut?”

Actually, the president has already agreed to cuts of $1.5 trillion. What, specifically, does Mr. Boehner want to cut now?

[Bonenanza]

The induced panic of Sequester is a joke that our president perpetuates while the costs of Obama care, medicare, SS etc continue to rise every time someone looks at the actual costs. It is not even a good band-aid.


The Pro-Growth Sequester

The Obama administration is whipping up hysteria over the sequester budget cuts and their impact on the economy, the military, first providers, and so forth and so on. Armageddon. But if you climb into the Congressional Budget Office numbers for 2013, you see a much lighter and easier picture than all the worst-case scenarios being conjured up by the administration.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100476675



Automatic Spending Cuts Are a Joke: Druckenmiller

The focus on the sequester is obscuring the real issue which is the exploding cost of entitlements, Stanley Druckenmiller founder of Duquesne Capital, told CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Thursday.

"The hype over sequestration is a joke," he said. "Sequestration is $85 billion. If you net out Hurricane Sandy you're talking about a quarter of 1 percent of GDP."

The debt and entitlement costs, which are expected to grow to $700 billion over the next four years, "will swallow our kids in 15-20 years," Druckenmiller said.

There is still time to tackle the issue, he said, but if it's not dealt with in the next four or five years, "we're going to wake up interest rates are going to explode and the next generation is going to have a tough time," he warned.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100482168

[joan1984]

One twentieth of THIS year's budget Deficit = 2013 Sequester amount.

[joan1984]

  It is comforting to see that KB members sensibly show little worry about unfair effects to themselves resulting from the Budget Act of 2011, regardless of the hyperbole from media and political speeches in recent weeks. Responsible management of this Sequester by the Administration and it's Agencies/Departments should bear out our trust in how hey carry out their duties responsibly from here forward.

  Note is is not unlikely to have further Sequester of budget authority as we continue with no defined Budget into 2014 and beyond, and as responsible leaders sort out the current Debt Ceiling negotiations, which was the genesis of the Budget Act of 2011. Responsibly limiting increases in future budget authority, thereby reducing future increases in money spent beyond current levels is an effort we can all relate to in our own home budgets, and support as functions of Federal Government are right sized.

[MissBarbara]

I found this piece from NPR to be a balanced and hyperbole-free summary of the situation and its consequences...


What's The Sequester? And How Did We Get Here?
by Scott Horsley
February 22, 2013


They've been everywhere this week: dire warnings about threats posed by across-the-board federal spending cuts.

Unless Congress acts, the cuts are due to take effect a week from Friday. The administration is trying to drive home the ways that could affect you.

For example, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned Friday that air traffic controllers will have to take unpaid days off beginning in April. Fewer controllers on the job could mean airport delays, and some airlines may decide to cancel flights.

"Look, this is very painful for us because it involves our employees," LaHood said. "But it's going to be very painful for the flying public."

LaHood, a former Republican lawmaker, says he has been calling some of his old colleagues in Congress, urging them to undo the automatic spending cuts.

But how much of this is just Washington hype? Here are the answers to four burning questions about the cuts known as "the sequester":


What will actually happen if these cuts do take effect?

President Obama has painted a pretty bleak picture of what will happen if Congress doesn't act to avoid the cuts: kids thrown out of day care; cancer screenings that won't be given. He even said criminals would be let go if the cuts take effect. There's a little bit of hyperbole there. Obama is trying to build public pressure on lawmakers, so he has an incentive to make the cuts seem as scary as possible.

Then there are Republican leaders in Congress, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who say the White House could easily avoid such pain by just cutting wasteful projects. Cantor suggested doing away with a machine that smokes cigarettes for medical research. That's also a bit of a caricature. Republicans want to make it seem as though much of what the government does is useless or even silly.

In fact, we probably won't see criminals set free, no matter what Congress does or doesn't do. But these are real spending cuts. They won't be visible right away. The air traffic furloughs that LaHood mentioned, for example, wouldn't start until April. But eventually the cuts would be felt — and those effects would mount up over time.


Which areas of government will be hit hardest?

By law, these cuts are across the board: half defense, half other programs. Social Security and military pay are exempt. For the most part, Medicare is spared.

But most other parts of government will see their budgets cut. And there's not a lot of leeway for triage or moving money around. The way the law was written, each activity has to give up a similar proportion of its budget.


How will this affect the economy?

Well, it doesn't help. People's paychecks already took a hit this year when the payroll tax went up. They're paying more at the gas pump. And now, if the government tightens its belt, that's another blow to the economy.

But as the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers said this week, it's not "catastrophic." It's not as bad as the "fiscal cliff" would have been, and certainly not as bad as breaching the debt ceiling. But it does take a bite out of economic growth — something in excess of half a percentage point.

And remember, the economy's not growing very fast to begin with. Slower growth means fewer jobs. Macroeconomic Advisers estimated we'd see about 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of next year if the sequester goes into effect and isn't changed.


So how did we get into this position? And how do we get out?

At heart, we got here because the two political parties can't agree on what size government we want or are willing to pay for.

Back in 2011, congressional Republicans demanded spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The two parties couldn't agree on that, so they punted and said if they couldn't make a deal by 2013, they would just do these automatic cuts that nobody likes.

In other words, the cuts were supposed to be a crowbar to pry open our gridlocked political process. But now it is 2013, the gridlock is still with us, and so we're using the crowbar to beat ourselves over the head.

If that gets painful enough, maybe lawmakers will agree to do something different. More likely, they will limp along until the next congressional deadline in late March. That's when the government's spending authority runs out. That would also be the next big showdown between the parties over what size government we want.



http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/02/22/172724248/whats-the-sequester-and-how-did-we-get-here?ft=3&f=1001&sc=nl&cc=nh-20130223

[joan1984]

 Thank you, Miss Barbara. Good to see that so far, no kb member reports personal difficulty with the impending change, a confiscation of "property", being budget authority, of 1/20th of the deficit increase that would otherwise be proposed by baseline budget increases each year.
  For 2013, this amounts to 22 Billion in non-Defense discretionary spending by Administration Agencies, and 22 Billion in Defense discretionary spending. Combined, less than the appropriation for Hurricane Sandy, to put into perspective for all.
  Let us trust in our President and his Cabinet to do the right thing, when implementing this along with their other duties in the best interests of the people of the United States.

[Janus]

 
  Let us trust in our President and his Cabinet to do the right thing, when implementing this along with their other duties in the best interests of the people of the United States.

I can't trust a thing that goes on in Washington. However, I will certainly hope that the choices they make will have a beneficial outcome for the entire nation.

[MissBarbara]

 Thank you, Miss Barbara. Good to see that so far, no kb member reports personal difficulty with the impending change, a confiscation of "property", being budget authority, of 1/20th of the deficit increase that would otherwise be proposed by baseline budget increases each year.
  For 2013, this amounts to 22 Billion in non-Defense discretionary spending by Administration Agencies, and 22 Billion in Defense discretionary spending. Combined, less than the appropriation for Hurricane Sandy, to put into perspective for all.
  Let us trust in our President and his Cabinet to do the right thing, when implementing this along with their other duties in the best interests of the people of the United States.

You're welcome. I liked this article because it is free from the polemical finger-pointing that mars most discussions on this topic (as found in all three of your posts).

[Athos131]

You're welcome. I liked this article because it is free from the polemical finger-pointing that mars most discussions on this topic (as found in all of your posts).

[MissBarbara]

You're welcome. I liked this article because it is free from the polemical finger-pointing that mars most discussions on this topic (as found in all of your posts).

Athos, that's completely out of bounds. If you want to say something, say it. But (speaking of straw men) don't put words in my mouth!

[Partner]

 Thank you, Miss Barbara. Good to see that so far, no kb member reports personal difficulty with the impending change, a confiscation of "property", being budget authority, of 1/20th of the deficit increase that would otherwise be proposed by baseline budget increases each year.

I'm not employed by the gov't, but our work is highly impacted by them.  We've done a lot of things in anticipation of the budget issues and we're in decent shape.  The boat will rock, but it certainly won't come close to capsizing.  People I interact with in other areas are facing 20% mandatory pay cuts, furloughs, layoffs, etc. 

Let's just say I'm REALLY happy I work where I do, and not in the place across the street.  Things could easily have been much different.  Right now, I'm working at about 125-150% of a normal expected annual workload and am not. complaining. a. bit.

[Janus]

What is FTFY?

[MissBarbara]

What is FTFY?

Fixed that for you...

[Janus]

What is FTFY?

Fixed that for you...

Thanks.......Was a new thing for me to learn I guess......

I'll go back to regularly scheduled programming now......The stuff edited by the original writer.....LOL

[Athos131]

You're welcome. I liked this article because it is free from the polemical finger-pointing that mars most discussions on this topic (as found in all of your posts).

Athos, that's completely out of bounds. If you want to say something, say it. But (speaking of straw men) don't put words in my mouth!

I'll cancel your sandwich made of ground dictionaries.

[joan1984]

Polemical finger pointing? In this thread? Please elaborate...

 Thank you, Miss Barbara. Good to see that so far, no kb member reports personal difficulty with the impending change, a confiscation of "property", being budget authority, of 1/20th of the deficit increase that would otherwise be proposed by baseline budget increases each year.
  For 2013, this amounts to 22 Billion in non-Defense discretionary spending by Administration Agencies, and 22 Billion in Defense discretionary spending. Combined, less than the appropriation for Hurricane Sandy, to put into perspective for all.
  Let us trust in our President and his Cabinet to do the right thing, when implementing this along with their other duties in the best interests of the people of the United States.

You're welcome. I liked this article because it is free from the polemical finger-pointing that mars most discussions on this topic (as found in all three of your posts).

[Janus]

The way I see it both Democrats and Republicans are quite happy to shy away from any compromise here. They get lots of ammunition for yummy finger pointing and still get their pay checks at the end of the month no matter what happens to the economy in the mean time. I suppose they each feel that the other would completely fuck up the country and think they're protecting the people in the long term or some other such bullshit justification (whatever helps them sleep at night) because they at least know no one's going to vote for anyone else. I still think your two party system is a little too Orwellian for my liking.

I couldn't agree more with this post. The part about the two party system is spot on as well. There are several parties that are not able to be heard because the media keeps folks in the dark. Also, the Republicans and the Democrats don't want others mucking up their system. 

[Katiebee]

We do not have a parliamentary system. Look to other countryies where they have more than two major parties yet try to work under the system we created. Two parties work fine. It's the electorate who screw it up by not making good decisions and not knowing what to tell their representatives.