Tag Archives: Budget Control Act

Articles of Interest

HUFFPOST HILL – This Year In Jerusalem!

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By The Huffington Post News Editors

Per the United Nations, today is the first International Day of Happiness, though we’re not sure if that’s possible on the ten-year anniversary of the war in Iraq while White House tours are suspended. The Tea Party Caucus has been inactive for months, though its members would prefer the lapse be considered a temporary reduction in the size of government. And the president’s limousine broke down in Jerusalem, meaning it’s only a matter of time until Uber becomes a government contractor. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Wednesday, March 20th, 2013:

SENATE PASSES CR, DELAYS GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN FOR SUPER LONG TIME (SEPTEMBER!!!!) – Also, it’s a terrible piece of legislation. Mike McAuliff and Sabrina Siddiqui: “The U.S. Senate passed a bill Wednesday to keep the federal government running after March 27, approving a six-month spending bill that adds to the unpopular cuts of “sequestration.” The $984 billion “continuing resolution” passed 73 to 26. It makes additional across-the-board cuts of 1.9 percent to 2.5 percent to various categories of spending on top of the $85 billion in cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 — the infamous deal that created the failed supercommittee and the resulting budget sequestration that slices $1.2 trillion over a decade. Lawmakers on all sides have hammered the blunt cuts as ‘stupid’ and ‘irresponsible’, yet resorted to the same strategy in this new funding measure because they have been unable to agree on anything else. A congressional source familiar with the negotiations — speaking freely on the condition of anonymity — explained that when the six-month bill was originally agreed to in principal last fall, all sides expected that the sequester would be replaced. But sequestration remains, and under the Budget Control Act, Congress had to spend less over the rest of this year than the original agreement contemplated.” The House is expected to vote tomorrow. [HuffPost]

Meanwhile in the House, shenanigans of the highest order: “Democrats voted present to force more Republicans to vote against the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) budget. Democrats hoped that by getting their members to vote present instead of against the budget, it might be approved by the House. That would have allowed Democrats to train their campaign ads on the RSC budget, which would boost the Social Security age to 70 and cut Medicare benfits, including for people now 59 years old. The RSC blueprint would balance the budget in four years. Only 14 Democrats voted against the RSC budget, along with 118 Republicans.” [The HIll]

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

Articles of Interest

Mitch McConnell Says Debt Ceiling Battle Needed To Drag Obama ‘Kicking And Screaming’ To Talks (VIDEO)

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By The Huffington Post News Editors

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell foreshadowed a new fight over the nation’s borrowing limit this summer, saying Tuesday that the only time President Barack Obama gets “serious” is when Republicans use the debt ceiling to drag him “kicking and screaming” into negotiations.

After Republicans had to give in on some of the tax hikes Democrats and Obama wanted in the fiscal cliff deal at the start of January, Democrats and Republicans have been working fairly diligently on funding the federal government once its money runs out at the end of March. The “continuing resolution” that would do so is still tied up in the Senate, where Republicans would like to make some changes to the House version. Nevertheless, the chance of a government shutdown showdown remains low.

McConnell’s remarks Tuesday on Capitol Hill suggested the GOP will hold its fire until the summer, when, like in 2011, the country could once again face a historic default if Congress doesn’t raise the borrowing cap. In 2011, that showdown caused a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating — and the creation of the Budget Control Act and “sequestration” — prompting many Democrats to accuse Republicans of being willing to destroy the economy in order to get their way on taxes and spending.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

Articles of Interest

Video: Is Martial Law Coming?

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By Kris Zane

When the Obama administration during its “War on Women” propaganda campaign was parading Sandra Fluke—the so-called “contraception girl”—on the red carpet leading to the White House, the Leftist blog Think Progress was leading the charge to take Obama’s Public Enemy Number One Rush Limbaugh off the air because of his Sandra Fluke “whore” comments.

Obama’s attack dog Media Matters then began literally feeding the mainstream media its talking points, all to ensure Obamacare would not be derailed by the “noise” of federal funding of contraception and abortifacients.

And of course, the third part of the unholy leftist trinity, the Center for American Progress, run by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta—considered the “brain” of the radical Left—was running the whole “War on Women” marionette show.

But behind the scenes of his marionette show, Podesta had bigger fish to fry.

Just off the heels of the debt ceiling crisis—part of the so-called sequestration debacle the Obama administration has been wringing their hands about lately—John Podesta was jumping for joy in the one hundred page position paper Rebalancing Our National Security. Written following the Obama-manufactured debt ceiling crisis, the paper touted the Budget Control Act of 2011’s gutting of the military to the tune of almost five hundred billion dollars over the next ten years, not the measly $86 billion sequestration cuts Obama has been wringing his hands about.

You can almost hear Podesta giggling in the background as he discusses how the military was being gutted:

The debate in Washington over security spending this year is being driven mostly by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the debt reduction deal that averted a government shutdown last summer. The law mandates about $1 trillion in cuts to federal government discretionary spending over 10 years beginning in fiscal year 2012, including $487 billion in Pentagon cuts…

…The “sequester” came in to play after Congress failed to reach an agreement on how to legislate the deficit reduction at the end of last year…The members of our Task Force agree with the near-universal consensus that sequestration is more about political maneuvering than sound budgeting practice. But we argue that the amount of cuts to the Pentagon budget mandated by both parts of the debt deal is readily achievable with no sacrifice to our security—if the cuts are done in a thoughtful manner over the next decade. We also agree that some of those savings in the U.S. defense budget should be redeployed to other parts of the federal government, specifically to those non-military programs that help our nation defend the homeland and prevent global crises from escalating into military confrontations…

Where should the gutted defense budget be “redeployed” to per Podesta? Not the $500 billion as proposed, but his call for one trillion dollars in cuts? Being a globalist, as expected, redistribution of wealth to the global community, with the United Nations no doubt holding the purse strings:

Our Task Force plan outlines an alternative trajectory for spending on offense and prevention that …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

News, Politics, Government

The Biggest Fib of 2013; We Have Reduced "the Deficit by More Than $2.5 Trillion"

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By Robert Lenzner, Forbes Staff The most shameful lie in the President’s State of the Union speech was the following claim: “Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion. As a result we are more than halfway toward the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.” I was shocked by this blatant attempt to convince the nation that it is not really necessary to make cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Rather, after misrepresenting the agreement reached in the Budget Control Act of 2011 to cap domestic programs by $1.2 trillion over 10 years– most of which are on the come– not actually made– the President then went on to try and spend more money we don’t have on infrastructure( he should have done it in 2009) It sure would be helpful if we could hire people to repair 70,000 bridges, establish pre-nursery schools for every 4 year old kid, attack the environmental problems that emanate from global warming, and welcome valuable immigrants from around the globe. But, first we have to decide which domestic programs need to be capped, and obtain agreement on how to proceed in a manner that won’t result in another recession and higher unemployment. Maybe the White House intends to pay for all this by closing loopholes for fat-cat oilmen. That would be a hell of an achievement. Still, I’d rather learn precisely how and where and when and how much we have already reduced the deficit by $2.5 trillion. There’s a challenge for some enterprising journalist like myself. I’ll let you know how it comes out ASAP. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

White House Press Office

Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney, 2/11/2013

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By The White House

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room

12:43 P.M. EST

MR. CARNEY: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the White House for your daily briefing. I know there’s a call time for the Medal of Honor ceremony, so we’re going to have to keep this quick so everybody who wants to attend, or is scheduled to attend, can do that.

I just wanted to note at the top — and I’ll do this quickly — that you probably saw a blog post by Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer over the weekend that makes clear a couple of points, and that is that, first, there is no reason why we should allow the sequester, with its indiscriminate cuts, to take effect. It is wholly false that the President has not put forward proposals that would eliminate the sequester. In fact, he’s done it three times — first, with his proposal to the super committee, which would have eliminated the sequester entirely. That was the whole idea behind the super committee’s work. Second, with his budget. And third, in his proposal to Speaker Boehner, which met Republicans more than halfway on spending cuts and entitlement reforms and revenues late last year.

We call on Congress — as you heard the President do — to allow itself the time and space to work together towards a broader budget agreement that eliminates the sequester entirely and reduces our deficit further by passing a short-term delay in the sequester in a balanced, responsible way — without drama, without delay, without inflicting the kind of unnecessary wound on our economy that we should absolutely not be allowing to happen at this time.

So I would also like to address briefly the fallacious assertions that Republicans have been making about who wants the sequester and who doesn’t. Let’s just be clear: When the Budget Control Act passed on August 11th, 2011, through the House of Representatives, it passed by a vote of 269 to 161. Based on statements by Republicans today, you would have thought that the vast majority of that vote was from Democrats. Well, in fact, 174 of the 269 were Republicans, House Republicans. Only 95 Democrats voted for that bill. And that included every Republican leader — Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, Congressman McCarthy, Congressman Ryan. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that day told CBS, “I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”

So I’m not sure how that squares with some of the commentary we’ve seen in the last few weeks.

With that, I’ll take your questions. Jim.

Q Thanks, Jay. On that issue, particularly on the short-term solution that buys time and space, some lawmakers are suggesting that Congress could give the President authority to better target some of these cuts in the short term. Would the President be amenable to that? That would be one way to avoid the kind …read more
Source: White House Press Office

News, Politics, Government

The Pilot Light for Our Future is Flickering

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By Mitch Free, Contributor

The March 1st deadline for indiscriminate budget cuts required by the Budget Control Act of 2011 is bearing down on us quickly.  You have probably heard of this referred to as sequestration.   It’s a shame that our politicians have procrastinated and not done the job we pay them to do.  If they cannot agree on a plan to pay off our debt and get us living within our means by March 1st, havoc will be wreaked on our economy and the pilot light of our future snuffed out due the indiscriminate nature of the budget cuts. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest