To: Everyone in the USA
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before
Re: “Sequestration”
Hey, everyone,
You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before. Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties? It was a whole big nothing-burger.
Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that the people felt whatever pain was generated – closing parks, cramping down on the voters. But as a rule, the whole thing affected nobody.
And here in Minnesota, we had a “complete” shutdown two years ago (which, again, wasn’t – the courts kept most of the government going as “essential”). It lasted a few weeks. Then Governor Messinger Dayton abandoned it, when he realized Minnesotans, for all his efforts to squeeze and scare them – shutting down state parks and highway rest areas, threatening to lay off teachers – barely noticed any difference. While the media did its best to prop up the Messinger Dayton line, the people of Minnesota heard the gales of calumny but saw and felt a big fat nada burrito. Even Governor Messinger Dayton – as cosseted and isolated from reality as his staff keeps him – noticed; on his trip around the state to whip up support for the DFL budget, he saw tepid crowds of union droogs, and a few professional protesters, and realized he had nothin’ (which may be why Dayton makes so few public appearances these days).
So it’s time for “sequestration” – the “radical” budget cuts that Obama and the super-di-duper commission agreed to as a stick to lead everyone to the “carrot” of an actual federal budget. We’ve been waiting nearly 1,400 days for a budget from the Democrat-addled Senate, so Washington figured a “stick” was needed.
By the way – how radical and drastic are those cuts?:
Yep. They’re not even cuts. They’re reductions in the increase. Indeed, almost completely worthless, if cutting spending is your goal, but really nothing but a fart in the wind; sort of like “dropping HBO” in your family budget, even though your gas bill is rising and your teenage kids are costing more and more.
Obama will try to make “sequestration” hurt; he’ll slow down the TSA lines, he’ll gundeck some ship overhauls and clamp down some military maintenance budgets, he’ll inveigle some big cities to lay off a few cops and teachers, he’ll shut down Yellowstone as the cameras record photos of crestfallen children. Hell, Joe Biden may even personally try to close the gates at Disney World.
But there is no there, there. It’s a scare tactic, engineered by Obama and his compliant media.
It needs to be ignored.
That is all.
Last year, I spent $50 per week on booze but this year I had planned to spend $100. Except nobody at my work got a raise so I had to cut back to spending only $90 per week on booze. I, personally, suffered a 10% cut in spending, which is the same as the federal government’s sequester percentage for 2013 and let me tell you, it’s a terrible tragedy. Why, I’m not even drunk twice as often as last year.
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Well, Joe, you better adjust your budget, because if the metro libturds have their way, we will be getting taxed as much as $4 per liter of our favorite hooch. They are proposing a new bureaucracy within our already inefficient judicial system, to “cure” a manufactured problem.
I liked the powerline guys’ analogy.
If the government budget is a Big Mac value meal of a Big Mac, medium coke, and large fries, then sequestration is a the radical diet of not eating two of your french fries. That’s one hell of a diet, folks.
It’s almost like the federal government has different goals than the People from whom it gets its power and legitimacy.
1980s film reference. In the Noir genre classic “Body Heat,” seductress Kathleen Turner responds to ne’er do well lawyer and patsy William Hurt’s cheesy pickup lines by asking: “Tell me, does this usually work on women?”
Hurt; “Some, if they haven’t been around.”
Obama, and fellow Dems, think the same classless BS will work one more time. Let’s hope people are finally waking up.
golfdoc and others……….I am continued to be amazed at how ignorant the general population is. Most have no clue what a trillion dollars is, to say nothing of $100 trillion. They know nothing of gov’t mandates and harrassment of business.
This is why federalism is so important. It is easier to deal with the state government then federal. And if youi can’t deal with the state, then move to another state.
Those booze taxes…….I will make monthly trips to Hudson and stock up.
Chuck, an awful lot of the ignorance is the responsibility of the pro-Obama mainstream media. I catch the 5PM network news occasionally, and it parrots the administration’s views. The words of Obama and his cronies are presented uncritically with little (if any) response by conservatives.
“I will gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.”
– J. Wellington Wimpy, AKA “Wimpy”
Chuck, I’m right there with ya’, only I won’t have to leave my house. My sister lives in New Richmond, so I’ll just have her bring a case every quarter or so. On another note, Wisconsin business owners along the border, must be dancing in the streets every time the Minnesota legislature convenes and glad that so many of our residents are mental midgets. Although, I would dare say that many of them are transplants from the surrounding states.
A caller to Jason Lewis’ show made an interesting comment. The government just cut my income (the Social Security tax going back to it’s correct rate) and this is a cut the same size. So if we can do it why can’t the US Government?
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
Mitch:
You forgot to mention it shut down Passport applications being processed! Those people want to have their passports were really pissed back in 1995.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
Case in point: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/eric-holder-sounds-sequester-alarm/story?id=18610419
Amid all of Holder’s whining because he can’t get his grubby hands on the wealth produced by working Americans, there is a single, almost incomprehensible paragraph describing the views of conservatives in congress:
Some Republicans have claimed the Obama administration is exaggerating the sequester’s purported consequences as a ploy to campaign for tax hikes. On “Fox News Sunday” this week, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., posited that federal agencies enjoy enough flexibility to avoid the worst consequences of the cuts.
There are two sentences in that paragraph. They do not connect. The second sentence does not build on or expand the first sentence. You could leave either of them out of the paragraph altogether.
Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are spending $85 billion a month on government and mortgage bonds. Maybe they could take just one month off?
The “sequester” cuts amount to less than 10% of the deficit. Even if we only hoped to reduce the deficit by half, which is really not good enough, and even if we split that deficit reduction equally between budget cuts and tax increases it would still require cuts larger than this “sequester”. Depending on how the wind is blowing, one party and then the other will have the upper hand and force their preference, but both will happen. Or we can get serious about addressing the cost of healthcare.
The real story here is that this country is unable to achieve a consensus for any budget cut at all. The last contrived crisis, the “fiscal cliff” resulted in a significant, albeit insufficient, tax increase. The sequester was supposed to be the budget-cutting complement to that deal but it is apparently politically impossible. All signs still point to inflation as the only way out.
/The U.S. economy grew slightly in the fourth quarter of 2012, but the meager showing underscored that spending cuts are slowing the recovery’s momentum./
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324662404578331940043312924.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories