Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Letting The Sequester Fester

I presume everyone who reads this blog is aware of the sequester... how it came to be constructed as a fate worse than debt [sic] for Democrats and Republicans alike, how it was fabricated by a congressional bipartisan bicameral super‑committee, how Republicans (mostly) and Democrats (to some degree) failed to find the requisite budget cuts thereby allowing the train wreck to happen at the beginning of the current year, and... well, I've discovered a lot of people seem not to know anything about the consequences of the cuts forced by the sequester.

And those consequences are, IMHO, horrendous. The sequester, again IMHO, should be ended forthwith. Letting it fester is liable to sink the ship of state, or at least drain the economy that floats it.

So... what are those horrendous consequences? Pro Publica does a good job of explaining the sequester and outlining the disaster it is wreaking on our nation's economy.

Go. Read. It's worse than you imagine. It's cutting a lot more than the silly White House Easter egg hunt.



ASIDE: an old friend of mine since middle school, a generally sane conservative, has nonetheless said crazy things about the virtues of shutting down large portions of the federal government to save tax dollars. It looks as if he, along with the Tea Party dominated House of Representatives, has lived to see that wish come true, at least in part. My congratulations to them. On the other hand...

I hope they don't mind too much when their mothers' Social Security checks and Medicare payments start being cut. And I do wonder how their churches... my friend is very religious... will feel about cuts to, and even closures of, Head Start programs, not to mention Meals on Wheels programs with... wait for it... waiting lists. Yeah, that's real Christian charity, all right.

4 comments:

  1. Reminds me of California conservatives, who are concentrated primarily in the Central Valley (especially Bakersfield) and Orange County (south Los Angeles). Both of which are, err, completely desolate barren deserts with no water for any real population except for (wait for it, wait for it....) GOVERNMENT WATER PROJECTS.

    Which, mysteriously, they never subject to their ruberic of "if it was any good, the free market would have built it." Funny how that works, isn't it?!

    ReplyDelete

  2. I have been looking for blogs like "Economist's View(Mark Thoma)" I am making my way through your blog roll but it is pretty long, and suggestions

    ReplyDelete
  3. Welcome back, Nony Mo. I found Economist's View thanks to a couple of refs last year on Paul Krugman's blog, Conscience of a Liberal, and from time to time, Krugman mentions other sources he respects.

    You might try Dean Baker at CEPR's "Beat the Press"; he does that, and many other needful things. Long ago someone else from CEPR (who? I don't remember) spoke at a political meeting I attended; that got me searching for sources associated with them.

    New Economic Perspectives is worth a look, as is the Next New Deal.

    Those are the economics blogs that I try to read regularly. I miss Max Sawicky, once at Economic Policy Institute I believe. He stopped blogging because he took a job somewhere that forbade him to do so; if you run across him somewhere else, please let me know.

    More at a later time...

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    Replies
    1. Apparently Max is at EconoSpeak (see blogroll), though I don't see his sig on any current posts. It's a good blog anyway.

      Delete

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