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With excruciating detail, the White House’s budget office on Friday laid out exactly where it will have to cut $109 billion from federal spending in January, including $11.1 billion from Medicare and $54.7 billion from defense spending.
The defense cuts include $21.5 billion from operations and maintenance for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the reserves and National Guard, and nearly $1.4 billion from military aide to Afghanistan, with tens of billions coming from procurement and other Pentagon accounts.
“The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions,” the White House’s budget office said in the report.
Blame the Republicans for agreeing to the deal then not negotiating. If they weren't obstructionists it wouldn't have come to this. Ryan's now trying to pretend as Chair of the Budget Committee he had nothing to do with the budget deal.
Why did Congress and the White House agree to the sequester in the first place? The government was approaching its debt limit, which needed to be raised through a congressional vote or else the country would default in early August 2011. While Democrats were in favor of a “clean” vote without strings attached, Republicans were demanding substantial cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit.
President Obama and congressional leaders ultimately agreed to the BCA, which would allow the debt ceiling to be raised by $2.1 trillion in exchange for the establishment of the supercommittee tied to the fall-back sequester, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains. The deal also includes mandatory spending reductions on top of the sequester by putting caps on non-entitlement discretionary spending that will reduce funding by $1 trillion by 2021.
Can the sequester be avoided? Yes, but only if Congress passes another budget deal that would achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Both Democrats and Republicans have offered proposals to do so, but there still isn’t much progress on a deal. The political obstacles are the same as during the supercommittee negotiations: Republicans don’t want to raise taxes to generate revenue, while Democrats are reluctant to make dramatic changes to entitlement programs to achieve savings.
Of course had Obama simply followed the recommendations of HIS OWN Debt Commission, none of that would have ever happened.
The debt commission assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire (taxes and gov't revenue would go up) and that there would be a great reduction in Iraq and Afghanistan military spending. I must assume from your reply that you are in favor of increased taxes and reduced military spending - the opposite of Romney's position.
What you fail to mention is all those cuts are automatic. The Republican congress insisted on matching cuts before granting the borrowing authority to keep the government going, and all those cuts are 'sequestering', the term used for the automatic cutting.
The President created his bi-partisan budget committee last year specifically to address the sequestering, and the committee came up with a plan, but the Repubs blocked everything the committee presented. Why don't you question the lack of any Republican alternative solution to the drastic automatic cutting? Is it because the Repubs don't have any plan at all, or is it because those automatic cuts they insisted on don't look so hot, now that their cows have come home?
You can't have it both ways, chump.
It's all there in the article you linked. It's funny how you try to spin it onto the President- the reason those cuts will happen is lying in the lap of the HELL, NO! Republican House, who talk big and do nothing but block everything until their feet are held to the fire.
Nice try, jt, but another big fail.
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