The Sequester and/or Government Shutdown Approacheth

[Direckshun]

Anybody else ****ing fed up with this shit? 2013: Year of the Cliff.

Sequester hits March 1st. Government shutdown hits March 27th.

Here's the conversation on the fiscal cliff. Here's the conversation on the debt ceiling (which we'll be returning to by May... sigh).

The White House discusses the entirety of the impact in post 136. It's devastating.

Here's the FAQ on the sequester (from September):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ter-explained/

The sequester, explained
Posted by Suzy Khimm
on September 14, 2012 at 2:35 pm

The White House has released its plan explaining how the sequester’s mandatory spending cuts to defense and domestic spending will be implemented in 2013. Here’s the background on what the sequester is, how it happened and what happens from here:

What is the sequester?

It’s a package of automatic spending cuts that’s part of the Budget Control Act (BCA), which was passed in August 2011. The cuts, which are projected to total $1.2 trillion, are scheduled to begin in 2013 and end in 2021, evenly divided over the nine-year period. The cuts are also evenly split between defense spending — with spending on wars exempt — and discretionary domestic spending, which exempts most spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid, as the Bipartisan Policy Center explains. The total cuts for 2013 will be $109 billion, according to the new White House report.

Under the BCA, the cuts were triggered to take effect beginning Jan. 1 if the supercommittee didn’t to agree to a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction package by Nov. 23, 2011. The group failed to reach a deal, so the sequester was triggered.

Why does everyone hate the sequester so much?

Legislators don’t have any discretion with the across-the-board cuts: They are intended to hit all affected programs equally, though the cuts to individual areas will range from 7.6 percent to 9.6 percent (and 2 percent to Medicare providers). The indiscriminate pain is meant to pressure legislators into making a budget deal to avoid the cuts.

How would these cuts affect the country?

Since the details just came out, it’s not entirely clear yet. But many top defense officials have warned that the cuts will lead the military to be “hollowed out.” Democratic legislators have similarly warned about the impact on vital social programs. And defense, health care and other industries that are significantly dependent on federal spending say that major job losses will happen if the cuts end up taking effect.

At the same time, if legislators try to avoid the sequester without replacing it with real deficit reduction, the U.S. could face another credit downgrade.

Why did Congress and the White House agree to the sequester in the first place?

The government was approaching its debt limit, which needed to be raised through a congressional vote or else the country would default in early August 2011. While Democrats were in favor of a “clean” vote without strings attached, Republicans were demanding substantial cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit.

President Obama and congressional leaders ultimately agreed to the BCA, which would allow the debt ceiling to be raised by $2.1 trillion in exchange for the establishment of the supercommittee tied to the fall-back sequester, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains. The deal also includes mandatory spending reductions on top of the sequester by putting caps on non-entitlement discretionary spending that will reduce funding by $1 trillion by 2021.

Who supported the debt-ceiling deal?

Party leaders, the White House and most members of Congress supported the debt-ceiling deal: The BCA passed on a 268-161 vote in the House, with about one-third of House Republicans and half of House Democrats opposing it. It passed in the Senate, 74-26, with six Democratic senators and 19 Republican senators opposing it.

Can the sequester be avoided?

Yes, but only if Congress passes another budget deal that would achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Both Democrats and Republicans have offered proposals to do so, but there still isn’t much progress on a deal. The political obstacles are the same as during the supercommittee negotiations: Republicans don’t want to raise taxes to generate revenue, while Democrats are reluctant to make dramatic changes to entitlement programs to achieve savings.

What happens from here?

No one on Capitol Hill thinks any deal will happen before Election Day. After Nov. 6, Congress will have just a few weeks to come up with an alternative to the sequester. The challenge is complicated by the fact that the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax, unemployment benefits and a host of other tax breaks are all scheduled to expire Dec. 31. The cumulative impact of all of these scheduled cuts and changes is what’s popularly known as the fiscal cliff. There’s already talk of passing a short-term stopgap budget plan during the lame-duck session to buy legislators more time to come up with a grand bargain.

[Direckshun]

Everybody pretty much just going through the motions.

Pretty obvious everybody is just saving their strength for the budget fight.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administ...l-on-sequester

Obama reaches out to Boehner, McConnell as sequester cuts loom
By Justin Sink
02/21/13 03:20 PM ET

President Obama on Thursday phoned Republican leaders in Congress to discuss the impasse surrounding $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to hit the government on March 1.

Obama made phone calls to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) eight days before the cuts are implemented and one day after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned they would lead to the furloughing of 800,000 civilian defense workers.

White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to give details of the call, while Republicans picked at Obama for not calling Democrats, a criticism that suggested they saw the calls as a political stunt.

"He placed calls earlier today to Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner, had good conversations, but I have no further readout of those calls for you," Carney told reporters at his daily press briefing.

The calls appear aimed at demonstrating Obama is engaged in trying to avert the sequester — which the president has described as a "meat cleaver" approach to budget cutting — and to answer GOP criticisms he hasn't reached out to them on major policy disputes.

A spokesman for Boehner suggested Obama should instead focus his efforts on Senate Democrats, noting that while the House has passed a pair of sequester replacement bills, the upper chamber has passed none.

"If he wants to avert the sequester, shouldn’t the President be focused on the House of Congress that HASN’T acted, and where his own political party holds the majority?" Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in an email.

The Speaker has insisted repeatedly that the House will not act again to replace the automatic cuts until a plan passes the Senate. But the odds of a deal in the Senate are slim, with McConnell saying that he is "not interested in an eleventh-hour negotiation."

“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester is going to go into effect,” McConnell told reporters last week.

Obama and Democrats want to replace the sequester with a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, but Republicans say no tax increases should be a part of the package after January's "fiscal cliff" deal, which raised tax rates on annual household income above $450,000.

Senate Democrats are expected to bring a bill to the floor next week that would replace part of the sequester with a minimum 30 percent tax on millionaires, a proposal Republicans have rejected.

The calls to McConnell and Boehner on the sequester follow calls by Obama on Tuesday to several Republican senators — including Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) — after they criticized him for not talking to them about immigration reform.

Obama has been criticized by Republicans for not reaching out to them on his agenda.

The president this week has waged a public campaign aimed at setting up the GOP for blame if they are not averted.

On Thursday, Obama said he didn't know if Republicans would be willing to continue negotiating to avoid the across-the-board cuts.

"At this point, we continue to reach out to Republicans and say this is not going to be good for the economy and this is not going to be good for ordinary people, but I don't know if they're going to move," Obama said during an interview on Al Sharpton's radio show. "We're going to have to try to keep pushing over the next seven or eight days."

In the interview with Sharpton, Obama repeated his charge that Republicans valued tax carve-outs for the wealthy over averting the sequester cuts.

"My sense is their basic view is that nothing is important enough to raise taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations, and they would prefer to see these kind of cuts that could slow down our recovery over closing tax loopholes," Obama said. "And that's the thing that binds their party together at this point."

Republicans have disputed that characterization, with Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck saying that Republicans were open to closing loopholes as long as savings were not used to finance new deficit spending.

"Americans know that if they give President Obama more tax revenue, he isn't going to use it to reduce the deficit; he's going to spend it," Buck said in a statement Tuesday.

Obama also argued that he felt like he had the political advantage, pointing to a USA Today poll released Thursday that showed a majority of Americans supported a deficit deal that included both new revenue sources and spending reduction.

"When you look at polling, 75 percent of the American people agree with me, that the way to reduce deficit sensibly is through a combination of spending cuts and tax revenue," Obama said.

"Unfortunately I think Republicans right now are so dug in on this notion of never raising taxes that it becomes difficult for them to see an obvious answer right in front of them."

Republicans have argued that they already agreed to new revenues in the "fiscal cliff" deal last month and that a sequester deal should come only from spending cuts.

The interview with Sharpton was one of three taped Thursday with African-American radio hosts, the latest leg of a media blitz intended to intensify pressure on congressional Republicans.

On Wednesday, Obama taped interviews with eight television stations, and earlier in the week he gave a speech urging a sequester deal at a White House event featuring first-responders facing furloughs or layoffs.

[Direckshun]

Love this piece from Krugman. A perfect, invaluable summary of the issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/op...er=rss&emc=rss

Sequester of Fools
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 21, 2013

They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, two years unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts.

But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.

That moment has now passed; even Mr. Bowles concedes that the search for a grand bargain is on “life support.” Let’s convene a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history.

Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week.

There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea. But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared mistake.

The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.

Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy.

House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice.

As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.

So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs.

But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas — ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.

[petegz28]

Krugman is not only a drama queen, he is full of shit as well

[petegz28]

And I should add Direckshun is spreading what he knows are flat out lies but what else is new?

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by petegz28

Krugman is not only a drama queen, he is full of shit as well

yeah they give out Nobel prizes in economics to everyone who is FOS.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

yeah they give out Nobel prizes in economics to everyone who is FOS.

JFC, they gave Obama a Peace Prize before he did anything. Come the **** on. You gots to do better than that, dude. That's besides the fact that Krugman is flat out lying but whateva!

[Comrade Crapski]

We won’t reach rock bottom until the entire country has looted itself out of existence.

[mlyonsd]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

yeah they give out Nobel prizes in economics to everyone who is FOS.

Evidently they do.

[petegz28]

Obama: I Will Veto Attempts To Get Rid Of Automatic Spending Cuts

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afonteve...spending-cuts/

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

yeah they give out Nobel prizes in economics to everyone who is FOS.

Unfortunately they actually do. They also give Peace prizes to people who invade and bomb countries that are no threat to them.

[Comrade Crapski]

Barack Husein Obama mmm mmm mmm!

[LiveSteam]

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Thats me jumping off a mile high cliff. With a can of Spam

[LiveSteam]

Originally Posted by LiveSteam

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Thats me jumping off a mile high cliff. With a can of Spam

SPLAT!

[blaise]

When did Direckshun's name get changed?

[LiveSteam]

Originally Posted by blaise

When did Direckshun's name get changed?

Last week I think