If Republicans are not feeling the pain, then why are they outraged about the elimination of White House visits and airport closures in their districts? Why are they trying to pass the blame on to President Obama? Do you have anything to back up your assertions or are you just mimicking Republican talking points? It is pretty obvious you have no clue about private enterprise and the people who run them. They are no different than the people who run government. Their motivations are the same. They all want paychecks. They all want to advance their careers. They all want to service their customers. And some do it better than others. There is nothing magical about business that always makes it better than government. And there is nothing magical about government that always makes it worse than private industry. You right wingers need to look no further than near Armageddon that was The Great Recession of 2007-2009 to see that your magical notions about government and the infallibility of private industry are just plain wrong. I worked for an S&P 500 company for many years. I am now retired. I went through many downsizing, right sizing and many other sizing events. And they were never to trim fat. They were always driven by an arbitrary number on the P&L. In many cases the long term livelihood of the company was sacrificed for a quarterly financial statement and executive bonuses. You don’t trim fat by arbitrarily pulling a number out of the aether. You cut fat by identifying waste and removing it, by making long term investments and improving productivity. Efficiency and productivity are ongoing events. They are not one-time events tied to an arbitrary P&L number. You’re using Brietbart as a reference shows some desperation on your part. Brietbart has been caught more than once altering media and the truth (i.e. lying) in order to deceive people like you and push the Republican political agenda. The article you reference is riddled with blatant lies. If you want to use references, start by using credible resources (i.e. ones that do not have a documented record of lying). http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/07/22/timeline-of-breitbarts-sherrod-smear/168090 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod#Defamation_lawsuit You are just repeating the nonsense you hear from the Republican entertainment complex. The cuts are real and they have real effects as President Obama has been warning about. That is why Republicans are trying to deflect blame for the early effects of sequester by blaming them on President Obama. There will be more, this is just getting started. Most of the cuts have not taken effect yet. Further, some of the cuts like airport closures were recently delayed by another month. The risk to public safety was just too great. And President Obama was not wrong in saying that government janitors are going to suffer as a result of this action. They are and will continue to suffer as a result of sequestration. Maybe the janitors in Congress will be spared sequester cuts, but janitors and other government workers in many other government agencies including the Pentagon will not be spared the axe. It is disingenuous at best to say the cuts are only 2% of the entire budget as you and your fellow Republicans have done since most of the federal budget avoids sequester (e.g. Social Security, some aspects of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans and military salaries). So the remaining part of the budget, the smallest portion of the federal budget, the portion of the budget affected by the sequestration is affected much more severely than the modest 2% you and your fellow Republicans have claimed.
You completely missed the point of my post if you have to ask that question first! Republicans are outraged because the Obama administration is trying to make the cuts painful.
LOL, yeah, I completely missed your point. No, your point was quite clear; you are simply mimicking Republican talking points and citing discredited references to support your claims. President Obama has little discretion in spending cuts that are and will be the result of sequestration. The cuts are mandated by law, the law these very same Republicans created. Congress designed the cuts and created them to be painful, painful enough to force Congress to create a rational budget and avoid these spending cuts. Congress thought the sequestration cuts they created and put into law were so egregious and painful that Republicans and Democrats in Congress would find less painful ways and more rational ways to cut federal spending. To that end, the sequestration law passed by Congress created a congressional super committee with special powers to develop an alternative to the sequestration spending cuts and avoid the sequestration. But the congressional super committee failed to find an alternative to sequestration as Republicans on the super committee walked away from negotiations. And now, when Americans begin to understand what they have created and what it means to them, rather than manning up and being honest Republicans want to blame President Obama for their malfeasance. It’s kind of ironic in that the Republicans who are now pushing austerity and walked away from the budget negotiating table on many occassions are the very same Republicans who are responsible for our debt and deficit issues. They are the ones that took a budget surplus and turned it into record deficits and debt. Republican so called deficit hawks like Ryan, Cantor, Boehner and McConnell voted for every profligate spending measure that has gone through Congress since 1999. Republicans are doing what they always do when they get caught; they are blaming their little brothers and sisters for their transgressions rather than manning up and taking responsibility for their actions. They are obfuscating and deceiving people. And now the Republicans who created the sequestration spending cuts and refused to negotatiate a reasonable budget want to blame President Obama because the law they created and intended to be painful is having the painful effects they wanted and designed the law to have. Only people like you would believe that crap. That is why Republicans are trying to sell it. I mean it is really funny in a sad and pathetic sort of way. If you had paid as much attention to what President Obama and the Democrats are saying you would know President Obama’s chief complaint with sequestration is that the law is arbitrary and gives him no latitude in making the spending cuts.
Yes, of course it is a Republican talking point for them to state what their opinion is/why! If that was clear, you shouldn't have needed to ask! Sheesh.
The cuts were designed, by the leaders of the Republican Party at the time, to be painful. That was done by Congress, not the executive branch. Republicans have been displaying outrage at the nature and consequences of their own governance and behavior for my entire adult life. Look at them rail against the size of US public debt, for example, or the intrusiveness of Homeland Security.
You don't seem to be able understand the difference between an opinion and a lie. Your claim, the claim you heard from Republicans in the Republican entertainment industry and repeated here, is a lie. It is not an opinion. It is a lie.
Er, well, no, they were proposed by Obama. Obama wants and has always wanted spending increases, not spending decreases. As such, he proposed the sequester as a sort of poison pill, a spending cut that would be unpalatable enough to republicans that they wouldn't let it take effect. Bluff, called: http://factcheck.org/2013/02/the-obamaquester/ Your suggestion makes no sense: unless Republicans wanted them to fail, why would they want them to be painful?
Wha? "Republican entertainment industry"? I've never even heard that before. If you really think Republicans (of which I am one, by the way) are lying to you about their own opinions, I'm really not sure where to go with that. It isn't possible to have a rational discussion in such a case. Are you really that extremist that you think everything the opposition does has some hidden, nefarious purpose behind it? Why couldn't it be possible that Republicans actually want to improve the country, they just have a different opinion on how best to do it? Again, I'm a Republican. I'm a person who understands businesses and economics. I know that a <10% cut in the budget of a company is as much an opportunity as a hardship. As such, I know the sequestration cuts should represent an opportunity to improve our government's efficiency/functionality, not decrease it. But hey, maybe I'm lying. Maybe I'm really looking to sabotage the country and just lying about really wanting to improve it (despite spending a few years defending it). Maybe I secretly want to harm the US a teeny-tiny-little-bit by cutting the budget a few percent at a time when money is tight. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Let me ask you this: do you think every worker in every company or government agency pulls their weight? Or are there a few who don't? If so, what fraction?
Well then you must have been sleeping. Fox and company have been calling themselves entertainers for years now in order to excuse their deviations from journalistic integrity. http://thinkprogress.org/media/2010/06/15/102494/beck-journalist-not-journalist/ And the Republican entertainment industry has been discussed openly for some time. I wish I could say I find your ignorance surprising, but I cannot. Below is a video of the Morning Joe Show in which David Frum, a Republican, and Joe Scarbough, a Republican and former congressman, talk about the Republican entertainment industry. The Republican entertainment industry has been a subject of discussion for more than a decade within Republican circles. But you won’t find Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others of their ilk discussing the subject. That is why people like you remain ignorant. That is why subscribers to Fox News have been consistently found in academic study to be more misinformed than people who watch no news at all. http://www.politico.com/blogs/media...-to-by-conservative-entertainment-149120.html As I said before, there is a difference between an opinion and a lie. You don’t’ seem to be able to understand the difference. I will help you out a bit with some references. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion “In general, an opinion is a belief about matters commonly considered to be subjective, i.e., it is based on that which is less than absolutely certain, and is the result of emotion or interpretation of facts.” - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie “To lie is to deliver a false statement to another person which the speaking person knows is not the whole truth, intentionally.” - Wikipedia OH, you must be one of Limbaugh’s 1 minute MBA’s. It’s quite obvious, not only do you not know much about your party; you know nothing about business and economics. I have a degree and a career in business and you have Rush Limbaugh 1 minute MBA. Or perhaps you are ignorant and deluded, I would say that is the more likely scenario . . . been watching too much Fox News and listening to too much Rush Limbaugh and company. And you are not the only one who has been in the armed services. I was in the military when it wasn’t cool to be in the military. No. But what does that have to do with anything? You have been pushing the Republican talking point that business is always good and government is always bad. And clearly that is not the case. How about you answer your own question, what percent of individuals in private industry and government don’t “pull their own weight”? What does “pulling their own weight” mean? You and your fellow conservatives/Republicans like to speak in broad generalities and avoid specifics. New workers are often can negatively affect productivity because resources need to be used to train them. Does that mean they are not “pulling their own weight”? Sometimes employees get ill, does that mean they are not “pulling their own weight”. Some workers have better skills than others. Who draws that line? As I told you before, efficiency is not an arbitrary number on a P&L. It doesn’t happen in magical force reduction actions. It is an ongoing process and the process varies from business to business and industry to industry. There is no magic. In oversimplification, Republicans, people like you, gloss over the details and reality in an attempt to make sense of your ideology. And then you wonder why you fail.
The way the democrats and President Obama did the sequestration, was to maximize pain not to increase efficiency or savings. The trick was to exaggerate the role of government, with dramatic cuts, so it is left alone in the future. For example, why close White House tours, when if President Obama did one or two less golf trips, we would pay for the tours. The goal was to create pain and not get rid of waste, so the low information voter will say, raise taxes. I used to work in a government job as an engineer. At the end of the fiscal year, which starts in July, you have June Jubilee. This is where all money, from the previous year's budget, not spent, can be blown on a wish list (things you want but don't necessarily need to do the job). I used to buy cool stuff, since it was considered funny money. It was not treated like tax payer money but more like monopoly money; use it or lose it. President Obama could have used all the June Jubilee money to pay down the sequester (in June) without any loss of services. The June Jubilee is after all the year's projects have been accomplished. But that would created the image that if there is june jubilee money out there which is extra, there must also be other money not needed. This was not the right stage lighting. Instead pain was more dramatic; effect.
Because they are less important than (say) the Center for Disease Control. I'm glad the visibile and meaningless stuff got cut, because the stuff you don't see (like tracking epidemics) is a lot more important. Ah. So people like you were the problem. Well, get rid of people like you and we're going in the right direction. (I worked for the government as well; we took our responsibilities more seriously.)
Er. . . no. You are just repeating Republican talking points again which play fast and loose with the facts in order to rationalize their irrational ideological agenda. The sequestration idea was floated by the White House as a way out of the 2011 debt default crisis which was engineered by Republicans in 2011 and resulted in the first ever US credit debt downgrade. If Republicans caused a debt default in 2011 as they threatened to do we would now be in a midst of depression. The Sequester was never a bluff. It was supposed to be an incentive for both parties to come to a rational budget agreement. If Republicans are not responsible for sequestration as you and they are now claiming, then why did they demand it? Why did they vote for it? And why don’t they repeal it if they find it so distasteful? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequester_(2013)#Legislative_history http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/...n-default-threats-helped-prompt-S-P-downgrade http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/07/25/debt.talks.timeline/index.html Your claim that President Obama has always wanted spending increases is a bit slimy, because it is another misrepresentation promulgated by Republicans. President Obama has proposed short term spending increases as a remedy for The Great Recession of 2007-2009. If you knew anything about business and economics as you have claimed, you would know that is the right solution for the right problem. On the longer term, President Obama has recommended and pushed for spending reductions, which again if you knew anything about economics and business, you would know that too is the right solution for the right problem. There is nothing radical or even controversial in President Obama’s economic solutions. Further, President Obama has already proposed, agreed and signed into law more than a trillion dollars in spending cuts. President Obama has proposed more than two trillion dollars in spending cuts mostly weighted in future years in order to protect the economy. President Obama keeps trying to pursue the Grand Bargan of more than 4 trillion dollars in deficit reduction and Republicans keep walking away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011 Additionally, you should read your references. I suggest you reread your Politico reference and this time pay attention to the entire article. Don’t just cherry pick the pieces you like at the expense of everything else. No your statements make no sense. Republicans as evidenced by Senator McConnell’s statement given shortly after the election of President Obama, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” has been to play politics at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the nation.
Joe, I don't know what value you think there is in being aggressive, condescending and presumptuous, but it isn't going to help you understand how other people think/what their opinions are and why. Your understanding of who I am, what the basis of my opinions is and why is quite wrong, but it isn't worth my effort to try to explain it to you because you clearly aren't listening/won't believe it anyway. Good luck to you.
Oh I understand how people like you think all too well. That is not the problem. I have been dealing with you guys for the last 6+ years in this forum. The problem is the misinformation (i.e. lies and deceptions) you guys pick up from the Republican entertainment industry and all the fuzzy thinking that goes with it. Your guys accept it willingly without question and become willing proselytizers preaching the “conservative/Republican” gospel. I have relatives, who are very nice people, but they are not well educated and ill informed, and they flood my email with the latest kooky nonsense they have picked up from the Republican entertainment industry. It is a religion for them. It isn’t about rational thought, facts and evidence. It is about a belief system inculcated by an entertainment industry which has craftily played on the cognitive biases of their victims/subscribers to advance their personal fortunes and a political agenda. Arguing with them is futile. They are as likely to change their “political opinions” or recognize a fact as they are to change their religious beliefs. And I assure you Hell will freeze over many times before they change their religious beliefs. If you want to have discussions based on the truth and honesty that is one thing, but when you deliberately exclude truth (e.g. President Obama’s deficit reduction actions), cherry pick and engage in a host of deceptions that is and entirely different matter. Are you telling me you were so ignorant of the facts, you didn’t know President Obama has signed over a trillion dollars in spending reductions into law and has proposed and pushed Republicans for a grand budget bargain that would have cut the deficit by more than 4 trillion dollars or were you lying when you said President Obama doesn’t want to cut spending?
The House, with a majority under the leadership of John Boehner (who bragged: "We got 98% of what we wanted"), designed, wrote, and passed by large majority Republican vote (the Dems were evenly split), the sequester bill. The question of who was bluffing whom is an interesting one, but the responsibility for the cuts as designed is clear. The Dems (and Obama? hard to say) are responsible for the inclusion of Defense, but otherwise without blame. The Republicans were bragging about this not too long ago - before the actual effects of their governance began to show up. That continues the Republican media timeline (cause, push, success, bragging, consequences, disavowal, blame, deflect, introduce: cause, push - - - ) that started around Nixon's tenure and took hold in 1980. I don't think the notion of government having extra money here and there it is probably wasting is a secret possibility the Obama administration feels it can keep from the American people. It's not a peculiar notion found only among some faction of the political scene. The notion that we could pay off the government's debts and meet its responsibilities by tapping June Jubilee money is. As a peculiarity of the bubble-trapped US political right, it reveals not only an inability to conceive of the realistic workings of actual governance, not only a deficit in reason and common sense, but a basic difficulty with arithmetic.
Do you have a source for that? The wiki joe linked is clear that it was designed, written and introduced by Democrats, to the Senate first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011#Legislative_history Basically everything you said about who's bill it was was exactly backwards! And Boener's 98% of what he wanted? Sure, he got a commitment from Obama that he'd get serious about cutting spending and replace the sequester with intelligent cuts. That would have been awesome if Obama hadn't reneged on it.
