By Peter Ferrara
President Obama is playing you again (and defiling his office as he does so).
President Obama told America yesterday morning that if the sequester goes through on March 1,
It will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research…. Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings…. So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”
This language is so far from reality that it defiled the White House like it has never been defiled before.
President Obama’s federal government is slated to spend $3.6 trillion this year. That is $3,600,000,000,000. The supposedly draconian sequester will reportedly cut that by $85 billion, which is just 2%. In fact, as Mark Levin pointed out last night, the actual cuts for this year from that level are $44 billion, which is 1% of the budget.
That won’t eviscerate anything. It won’t stop emergency responders from saving victims of disasters, won’t shut down the border patrol, won’t mean longer delays at airports without security or air traffic control, won’t lay off FBI agents, won’t stop criminal prosecutions, won’t terminate thousands of teachers, won’t leave hundreds of thousands of Americans without health care, won’t “add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.”
All that is paid for with just 2% of federal spending? Even after the fearsome sequester, federal discretionary spending will still be $60 billion more than in 2008. The government’s own Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified $125 billion in government waste that can be cut without hurting anybody. Just as I said above about the effects of such tiny cuts.
What all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth means is that Obama and the Democrats think even cutting federal spending by 1% to 2% is the end of the world. But after the sequester goes through, only a few hundred Americans out of 300 million will even notice any effects at all.
Read entire article
No comments:
Post a Comment