Obama's Sequester Plan: Dread on Arrival

Tony Perkins, FRC Washington Update: Yesterday, the White House pulled one of the oldest stunts in the liberal handbook: if the facts don't work in your favor, just scare people with ridiculous claims about what cutting government spending will do. With an emergency medical first responder team as his backdrop, President Obama painted a bleak picture of the country after March 1, when the first wave of sequester cuts is scheduled to hit. "[First responders'] ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go..."

It wasn't exactly Joe Biden's "stop these cuts or there will be more rapes and murders," but President Armageddon, as the Wall Street Journal calls him, did his best sky-is-falling routine. It's an old ploy, Kim Strassel points out, designed to frighten people into supporting government spending. In reality, "voters should scoff at the idea that a $3.6 trillion government can't save one nickel of every dollar [it] spends."

Apart from frightening people, it seems the White House has no legitimate strategy for ending a "crisis" that, ironically, it helped create. While the President complains that these cuts "are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls," he seems to forget that he's the one who invented the idea. But instead of showing leadership and offering up solutions for true reform, the President is trying to panic people. Veterans will go hungry, the administration claims, meat will spoil, poor people will be kicked out of their homes, schools won't have teachers, the mentally ill won't be treated. President Obama even argued that the cuts would "jeopardize our military readiness"--something he's never minded before, based on how he's imposed his radical social policy on our nation's troops.

"We agree the sequester is a bad way to cut spending," said Speaker John Boehner's office. "That's why we've twice passed a plan to replace it with common sense cuts and reforms that don't threaten our security, safety, and economy. A solution now requires the Senate--controlled by the President's party--to finally pass a plan of their own."

In the meantime, Speaker Boehner explains, these cataclysmic events are mostly for show. There are plenty of ways to replace the $87 billion in cuts without raising taxes or letting criminals on the loose. "The President got his higher taxes--$600 billion from higher earners, with no spending cuts--at the end of 2012. He also got higher taxes via ObamaCare... No one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cell phones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines. Washington must get serious about its spending problem." Surely a government that gives food stamps to lottery winners can find a few ways to save.

---

Tags: Tony Perkins, Family Research Center, FRC, Brack Obama, The sequester,INSERT TAGS To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!