Washington's Red Ink Express

by AF Branco

Today in Washington, D.C. - Feb. 26, 2013
The Senate voted to end debate (71-27) today on President Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the secretary of Defense. The vote for confirmation only requires a simple majority and is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. God help our military and the security of our country!

Yesterday, the Senate voted 93-0 to confirm Robert E. Bacharach to be United States Circuit Judge for the Tenth Circuit.

The House is in session and dealing with some internal House rules and committee issues. Yesterday the House voted 394-0 to To redesignate the Dryden Flight Research Center as the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center and the Western Aeronautical Test Range as the Hugh L. Dryden Aeronautical Test Range.

At a press conference with Republican leaders today, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called on the president to stop using the military as a campaign prop to demand more tax hikes and start working with his own Democratic-controlled Senate to act on a credible plan to avert his sequester.

Instead of finding a way to replace his sequester with smarter spending cuts and reforms, CNN says President Obama is holding campaign-style rallies to “inspire public outrage.” Unfortunately for the White House, the gimmick isn’t playing well in Newport News, VA where the president will be today.

A civilian working for the military has confirmed to this editor that they have been advised that they will be reduced from 5 to 4 days a week with no pay or leave time allowed to cover the lost day of pay. This is a 20% pay cut. The President has not taken action to agree with the House to exercise smart cuts to achieve the reduction verses laying off civilians employees across the board. So far, the President while spending money flying around on Air Force One for dubious reasons has showed little effort to cooperate and reduce wasteful spending.

After weeks of dissembling from the White House, more reporters are beginning to call out President Obama for his misrepresentations and scare tactics involving the sequester.

Over the weekend, Bob Woodward wrote an op-ed, reaffirming his reporting that it was the White House that created and insisted on the sequestration mechanism. Woodward wrote, “[T]he automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of [White House chief of staff Jack] Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government. Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).”

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell added his own recollections: “[I]t’s time to put the record straight. And as someone who was personally involved in the 2011 budget talks, I think I’m uniquely qualified to do it. On the question of who came up with the idea in the first place, it originated, as I just noted, in the White House. I was less than 100 yards from this very spot when Vice President Biden called me at my desk to lay it out. He explained the sequester in exquisite detail, and then, as has been reported, the administration stubbornly stuck by those details throughout the negotiations, refusing any effort by Republicans to adjust its design in any way.”

Meanwhile, other reporters have been examining the parade of horribles that will supposedly be visited upon the country if the sequester goes through that the president and his cabinet secretaries have spent days warning about. In a lengthy fact-check piece today, the AP writes, “Over the last week or so, administration officials have come forward with a grim compendium of jobs to be lost, services to be denied or delayed, military defenses to be let down and important operations to be disrupted. . . . For most Americans, though, it's far from certain they will have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day if the budget-shredder known as the sequester comes to pass. . . . For now, there's a whiff of the familiar in all the foreboding, harking back to the mid-1990s partial government shutdown, when officials said old people would go hungry, illegal immigrants would have the run of the of the land and veterans would go without drugs. It didn't happen.”

The fact-check points out, “[T]here is a lot of improbable precision in administration statements about what could happen: more than 373,000 seriously ill people losing mental health services, 600,000 low-income pregnant women and new mothers losing food aid and nutrition education, 1,200 fewer inspections of dangerous work sites, 125,000 poor households going without vouchers, and much more. ‘These numbers are just numbers thrown out into the thin air with no anchor, and I think they don't provoke the outrage or concern that the Obama administration seeks,’ said Paul Light, a New York University professor who specializes in the federal bureaucracy and budget. For all the dire warnings, he said, ‘It's not clear who gets hurt by this.’”

Indeed, the AP writes, “[I]n practice, through all the layers of bureaucracy and the everyday smoke and mirrors of the federal budget, there is rarely a direct and measurable correlation between a federal dollar and its effect on the ground. That has meant a lot of tenuous ‘could happen’ warnings by the administration, not so much ‘will happen’ evidence.”

More important than the administration’s hyperbolic rhetoric is the larger fiscal situation of this country, as McConnell explained. “For more than a year, [President Obama] resisted and dismissed every Republican attempt at a compromise. He refused to offer any kind of reasonable alternative, and he even threatened to veto other proposals aimed at averting the sequester. And now, here we are, with the President presenting the country with two options: Armageddon or a tax hike. Well, it’s a false choice, and he knows it. But then, the President’s a master at creating the impression of chaos as an excuse for government action. Do nothing. Fan the flames of catastrophe. Then claim the only way out is more government, in the form of higher taxes. Look: the choice we face isn’t between the sequester and tax hikes. Remember, we’re only talking about cutting 2 to 3 percent of the budget. Any business owner or middle-class parent will tell you it’s completely ridiculous to think Washington can’t find a better way to cut 2 to 3 percent of the federal budget at a time when we’re $16 trillion in debt.”  To illustrate this, Leader McConnell noted, “Every single working American had to figure out how to make ends meet with 2 percent less in their paychecks last month when the payroll tax holiday expired. Are you telling me Washington can’t do the same? It’s absurd.”

Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Thursday joined a parade of retailers, restaurants and consumer-goods companies worried about the economic impact of the recently restored federal payroll tax that has left Americans with less money to spend. The world's largest retailer, Burger King Worldwide Inc., Kraft Foods Group Inc. and others are lowering forecasts and adjusting sales and marketing strategies, expecting consumers with smaller paychecks to dine out less and trade down to less expensive purchases. The expiration of the payroll tax cuts that knocked 2% off consumers' take-home pay is having an impact, these companies say. It will ding a household with $65,000 in annual income $1,300 this year, and shift $110 billion overall out of consumers' hands, estimates Citigroup.”

As Leader McConnell sums it up, “I think there’s an even larger point to be made here. The President’s been going around warning of utter chaos if the sequester takes effect. And while I agree that those cuts could be made in a smarter way, and don’t like the fact that they fall disproportionately on defense, what does it say about the size of government that we can’t cut it by 2 to 3 percent without inviting disaster? Doesn’t that make our point? Hasn’t government gotten too big if just cutting the overall budget by a couple percentage points could have that kind of impact? Personally, I don’t believe the world will end if the President’s sequester takes effect. But our country would be much better served if the Democrats who run Washington would get off the campaign trail and work with us to trim the budget in a more rational way.”

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Tags: US House, US Senate, Chuck Hagal, DOD, Sequester, President Obama, Washington, Red Ink Express To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!