I got this via email today from a regular correspondent who works for a state agency; I’ll add emphasis to the key parts:<\/p>\n
\u00a0“A friend of mine at [another state agency] told me about the hype and reality of his situation.”<\/p>\n
“The national association to which the state agency is affiliated with has sent out a series of communications intended to raise anxiety about sequestration. The national association declares that almost 1 million vulnerable Americans will lose their health care services due to sequestration. The actual effect on my friend\u2019s local agency is that their federal financial allocation will drop by 4%<\/strong>. This drop is after increases totaling almost one third more in 2013 compared to 2008<\/strong>. The actual amount of the sequestration cut can be absorbed by cutting the local agency\u2019s travel budget by about 40%.<\/strong> The largest cuts at the national level will be to reduce the expansion<\/strong> of the program, not cuts to existing clients.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Guesstimating the net effect in federal dollars on this state agency; a 4% reduction in aid that’s risen 33-odd% in four years takes the agency back to, er, August of 2012.<\/p>\n
Once upon a time P. J. O’Rourke said that this sort of budgeting – “Baseline Budgeting”, where all increases and decreases are relative to the previous budget – allows both sides to look at a budget that reduces an increase, claim simultaneously that the budget increases spending and cuts spending, and both be telling the truth and lying.<\/p>\n
Anyone who “survived” the 2011 “government shutdown” recognizes this sort of ofay alarmism.<\/p>\n
Hopefully a majority of the rest of the country does, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got this via email today from a regular correspondent who works for a state agency; I’ll add emphasis to the key parts: \u00a0“A friend of mine at [another state agency] told me about the hype and reality of his situation.” “The national association to which the state agency is affiliated with has sent out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34733"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34745,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34733\/revisions\/34745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}