Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The GOP approach to the sequester is so deeply unserious that no deal looks even remotely possible. Greg Sargent reported last week, GOP approach to sequester jumps shark:
[Weeper of The House John] Boehner told reporters that the Senate would have to go first in coming up with a plan to avert the sequester. [This is an abdication of his constitutional duty: all tax and spending bills must originate in the House, Article 1, Section 7.] Then he added:
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told my Republican
colleagues at our retreat,” Boehner said. “The sequester will be in
effect until there are cuts and reforms that put us on a path to balance
the budget in the next 10 years.”
So, Boehner says House Republicans are not only willing to let the
sequester hit, but that the only acceptable replacement for it will be a
plan that wipes away the deficit in 10 years — all without [new] revenues.
Let’s pause to consider what this means. Getting rid of the deficit
in 10 years with no new revenues would require extraordinarily deep cuts
to the federal government. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently ran the numbers and concluded
it would require across the board cuts totaling anywhere from one-sixth
to one-third of the government, depending on whether defense and/or
entitlements are included. Boehner is saying that it’s either this or
the sequester remains in effect.
What’s more, consider the timing here. There’s simply no chance that
House Republicans will produce such a budget by March 1st, which is the
deadline for the sequester. If Boehner means any of this, he’s
confirming that we’re getting the sequester, and it will remain in
effect until it is replaced by a plan that is simply never, ever going
to happen. Wiping out the deficit in 10 years with no new revenues would
be at least as bad as the Ryan plan [which did not balance the budget for 28 years, if ever] — probably worse — yet even that
plan was loaded up with unspecified cuts and other big question marks.
Republicans are never going to propose specific cuts that balance the
budget in 10 years with no new revenues — ever. Boehner has, in effect,
just taken ownership of the sequester.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats unveiled their own replacement plan for the sequester last week.
As expected, it contains roughly a 50-50 split of cuts and new revenues
via the closing of various loopholes enjoyed by the rich and
corporations.
So here are the politics of this in a nutshell. Democrats want the
sequester to be averted through a mix of roughly equivalent concessions
by both sides. But Republicans are so eager to avoid raising even a
penny of new revenues from the rich and corporations that they would
sooner present this as a choice between the sequester — which they
themselves say will gut defense and tank the economy — and downsizing
the government by anywhere from one sixth to one third. The argument
here is supposed to be that Senate Dems will have to agree to something
that from their point of view is significantly worse than the sequester — balancing the budget in 10 years with no new revenues — or we’re stuck with the sequester.
I don’t know what it will take to get folks to acknowledge just how
profound the imbalance between the two parties’ handling of the
sequester has become. If this doesn’t demonstrate it clearly enough,
than nothing will.
Oh, but Greg, you know the Beltway media villagers will play their game of false equivalency and say that both sides are to blame, even though the Democrats are negotiating in good faith, and the Tea-Publican economic terrorists are holding the American economy hostage to their extortionary demands for their discredited austerity measures that will cause another recession and job losses — that they will, of course, then blame on the president. And the feckless media villagers will play along.
UPDATE: Maybe a reminder would help the media villagers. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), talking to Fox News in August 2011, on automatic sequestration cuts:
"What conservatives like me have been fighting for, for years are
statutory caps on spending, legal caps in law that says government
agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money. And if they breach
that amount across the board, sequester comes in to cut that spending,
and you can't turn that off without a supermajority vote. We got that in law. That is here." [emphasis added]
Got that? The GOP's alleged boy genius is now happier than a pig in shit that the sequester he got as ransom during the GOP's debt ceiling hostage taking will go into effect. Tea-Publicans want to destroy government, not effectively manage government. It is economic terrorism.