Now that the House and Senate have moved to put the kibosh on sequester furloughs of air traffic controllers and other transportation security employees, what is the genesis of a 10 percent reduction in labor hours for a two percent sequester reduction?
Last Wednesday on the floor of the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said that spending cuts as a result of sequester could cost us a cure for AIDS, Parkinson disease and cancer. No, you can’t make this stuff up.
The comments are just the latest in a series of ridiculous claims that Reid has made in an attempt to rally support to set aside cuts that are the result of the failure of the Congress to work out a plan to cut spending in a targeted way.
Since it became clear that sequester would go forward Democrats have tried everything from ending White House tours to long delays at airports as a way to gin up support to reverse the sequester cuts.
Only a month ago Reid took to the Senate floor and implied a Marine helicopter training accident that killed seven during a training mission was due to sequester:
“Mr. President, it’s very important we continue training our military, so important. But one of the things in sequester is we cut back in training and maintenance. That’s the way sequester was written…. These men and women, our Marines were training there in Hawthorne.”
The Marines were quick to respond to Reid saying his claim was outrageous and untrue.
Administration officials claimed that as many as 6,500 flights could be delayed daily due to the furloughs of as many as 14,000 air traffic controllers in another example of exaggerating the impact of a 2 percent spending reduction.
The actual average of daily flights that were faced with unusual delay issues since the furloughs began was 1,200, more than 80 percent below the administrations projection and many of these were due to inclement weather and not spending cuts.
Sadly the Democrats, who have no desire to slow the growth in government spending, let alone actually cut spending, are only focused on convincing Americans that the government cannot function spending only 2 percent less per year.
Sequester is upon us only because the Congress and President Obama failed to do their jobs. Sequester was Obama’s brainchild and Congress went along with it, and now most on the left are trying to avoid the $85 billion in spending cuts at the same time they’re blocking bills brought by Republicans that allow government departments to selectively reduce spending rather than the across-the-board reductions mandated by sequestration.
Allowing government departments to make cuts to areas that would have the least impact on the public, though commonsense, removes the image of suffering Americans the Democrats need to drive public opinion towards higher spending.
The sequester reduces the growth of federal spending by $85 billion for one year while the Federal Reserve is spending that much per month to prop up the bond market and will continue to do so until unemployment drops to 6 percent. If the Democrats are so worried about sequester, why not skip a month of the $85 billion being invested in the bond market by the government and use it to replace sequester reductions?
There are many ways to offset the sequester reductions, but any plan that addresses the problem, rather than sweeping it under the rug, runs against the objectives of the Democratic leadership: avoid reductions of any kind at any cost.
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