If you listen to almost everyone in government, the sky is falling. March 1, the sequester cuts go into effect and unless the government saves us from this latest crisis, the country will completely fall apart. President Obama has wasted little time in using this “crisis” to his political advantage. We have seen him on television selling the idea that if the sequester goes through some 800,000 government workers will lose their jobs, jails will be closed and criminals set free. Hospitals will close and send away sick people, the entire country will burn because there will be no firefighters. The military will not be able to protect the country, airlines won’t be able to fly, food will be poisoned and air and water will be dirty. Sick people will die, poor people will starve, parks will be closed, basically the end of the world. Maybe the Mayans were a couple of months off in their calendar.
Both parties have been promoting the evils of the sequester cuts, but what is the truth. The truth of the matter is that the sequestration is a joke, a scare tactic created by the government to avoid any spending cuts. Both Republicans and Democrats are blaming each other for the “devastating” effects of the sequester. I guess they forgot that it passed a Republican controlled House, a Democratic Senate and signed into law by a Democratic President. So how does that make it the fault of one party? It just shows that neither party is serious about cutting spending.
What makes the sequestration a joke you ask. First off, the sequestration cuts over a trillion dollars in the next ten years, averaging about $85 billion a year. The annual “budget” is roughly at $3.5 trillion, $85 billion represents just over 2% of the budget. If cutting merely 2% of the budget is going to cause the end of the world, I would hate to see what real cuts would do to the country. To bring this into a little more focus, the Hurricane Relief bill and the recent unemployment insurance bill totaled $80 billion, just $5 billion less, but these cuts will devastate the country. Any leveled headed person who logically looks at the situation, knows that this is nothing more than scare tactics.
Not convinced yet, it gets even better than the fact that there is no way a 2% budget cut could trigger all of these catastrophic events. The federal budget increases every year, usually around the rate of inflation. This sequester cuts only the proposed rate of spending. The federal budget is set to increase by approximately 1.7% this year, with the devastating effects of the sequester, the federal budget will increase by approximately 1.6%. So even with the sequester, the federal government will continue to spend more money than it did last year. How does a decrease in the rate of future spending cause such catastrophic events to occur? Simple, it doesn’t. Just another manufactured crisis created by the federal overlord to continue to take more and more from the citizens to feed their spending addiction.
Senator Rand Paul is about the only person in Washington D.C. that is speaking the truth about the sequester, he is telling anyone that will listen and trying to tell all of those that won’t listen. It’s a shame he is up against the main stream media and President’s lies about the entire situation. We, the people need to look at the true facts and not listen to the lies propagated by a compliant media at the behest of politically motivated ruling class.
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