The President Calls For An End To Deficit Reduction

     The forked-tongued President is at the same time touting a reduction in the federal budget deficit he had nothing to with, and calling for an end to the sequester cuts which in part have been responsible for that very reduction. The federal deficit has been cut in half, from 1.2 trillion dollars to only 600 billion dollars. It is good to know that our federal government is only spending 600 thousand million more dollars than it takes in, and this is being touted by the Spendthrift In Chief as a positive achievement. That slimmer budget deficit represents what the entire federal budget was just thirty years ago.
     So President Obama receives credit from the mainstream media and low-information voters for halving the deficit, but no blame for increasing it four times the amount it ever reached under most of the Bush administration. And one of the few things that has led to a reduction in the budget deficit, i.e., the sequester, Barack Obama wants to eliminate. President Obama fought the commencement of the sequester cuts this past January after having hood-winked Republicants into voting for them in August of 2011 as part of the debt ceiling negotiations.
     The President thought the sequester cuts would never go into affect, and that he could use the threat of the cuts to hold political sway over Republicants. But when he was unable to do so, he chose to cut expenditures that would hurt the American people the most. Remember the air traffic controllers, cancellation of White House tours and shuttering of national parks? But maybe the President has once again gotten the better of Republicants. Many on the right have been positively giddy over the reduction in the deficit, which may make their case for further cuts, especially in entitlements, a moot point. The fact that anyone on the Right would be happy about cutting a deficit in half that was bloated beyond the point of good governance, is sort of like a man on a sinking ship with a twelve foot hole in its side being happy about having a thimble with which to bail out the flood of water.
     The fact that this government needs to be cut, not by measly single digit percentage points, but by double digits, has not stopped President Obama from rattling the cage of the sequester beast. He is not promoting the removal of the sequester cuts because they have had a negative effect on the programs and agencies he favors, nor because they have had a negative effect on the economy at large. No, the reason the President is bringing up the issue of the sequester now, when it is totally off the radar screens of most Americans, is so that he can blame it for the negative and pathetic economy that has resulted because of his policies.  
     President Obama knows that there is not much chance that the economy is going to improve before next year's mid-term elections, it is the reason he has engaged in the illegal activity of delaying large parts of ObamaCare. But it is also why he is now trying to characterize the sequester as the Republicants fault and the reason for high unemployment and low Gross Domestic Product growth. And Mr. Obama may just succeed because once again the Republicants are being trumped in the PR war, choosing not to even have a dog in the fight. The Republicants need to get out in front of the President's latest scheme to blame them and explain to the American people that after five years of this recession, the policies of the man in the White House have continued the economic hardship for Americans that should have been a distant memory by now.
    
    

Post Sequesterlypse America

     As I drove home yesterday from my cabin retreat in the hills of Southern Ohio, I expected a myriad of horrible Sequester-inspired tragedies to greet me. After all the President said unless the Republicants in Congress caved on raising taxes as part of a deal to avoid the automatic spending cuts of the Sequester, the country would be plunged into a new dark age. So I thoroughly expected to see children and seniors starving in the street, airliners falling out of the sky and fires burning out of control for lack of an adequate number of firefighters. Of course none of this came to pass and life in America continued almost completely uninterrupted.
     President Obama's calculated political bluff of grossly exaggerating the effects of the Sequester was called by John Boehner and the rest of Congressional Republicants, to both the President's and my amazement. President Obama had to stumble and stammer through a back peddle that would have put a trained circus bear to shame. The dirty little secret of the Sequester cuts, besides the fact that they aren't cuts but a reduction in the rate of growth, is that the President has the authority and discretion to apply them to non-critical programs and expenditures. He didn't, for example, have to indulge his petty and childish revenge against Jan Brewer by releasing thousands of illegal alien criminals into her state and blame it on Sequester cuts. But then Barack Obama could never be accurately portrayed as an adult. Unfortunately the power of the Presidency is in the hands of someone who is emotionally eight years old.
     So where do we go from here? The next battle is raising the debt ceiling and the passage of a continuing resolution to fund the federal government. Congressional Republicants should force the President and Senate Democrats, with a government shut-down if necessary, to execute their Constitutional duty that they have avoided for the last four years and pass a budget. The Republicants should also impose stricter and realistic cuts to the bloated federal budget and tax and entitlement reform. What the Republicants should not do is fear being demonized for doing the right thing for the country, that will happen no matter what they do. When Newt Gingrich and the Republicant majority in the House shut down the government in the 1996 budget debate, they forced the popular and politically skillful President Clinton to cave and agree to a balanced budget. And even though the Womanizer In Chief took credit for it after fighting it tooth and nail, it was the right thing to do for the country and should be the focus of today's Republicants.
     We can no longer, as a country, afford to throw away money on programs like Head Start, that even the federal government has said is a failure of epic proportions. Head start costs the American taxpayers a whopping eight billion dollars a year and has no discernible benefit to those very taxpayers who fund it with their hard-earned dollars. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of federal programs with similar budgets and records of failure that can be eliminated. It's time for the Republicants to show the kind of backbone they did in the Sequester battle in every battle to come. If they do, they can turn back the barbarians at the gate. If they don't, then the barbarians will pick clean the bones of the greatest nation to ever exist in the history of man.