In the last few years, President Obama and both parties in Congress have worked together to reduce our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a combination of spending cuts and increased tax rates.
In 2011, Congress passed a law saying that if they couldn’t agree on a plan to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion — including the $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction lawmakers in both parties have already accomplished over the last few years — about $1 trillion in automatic, arbitrary and across the board budget cuts would start to take effect in 2013.
“The whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth. And so this was all designed to say we can't do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration."
Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t compromised, and as a consequence, harmful cuts — known as the sequester — begin March 1.
These cuts will jeopardize our military readiness and reduce job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research, and don’t take into account whether they eliminate some bloated program that has outlived its usefulness, or cut a vital service that Americans depend on every single day
To prevent a costly, self-inflicted wound to our economy and middle class families, President Obama put forward a plan to avoid these harmful cuts and reduce the deficit by cutting spending and closing tax loopholes. Most importantly, his plan protects the investments we need to help strengthen the middle class, grow our economy and keep our country safe.
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