The media has been consistently referring to the sequester as “spending cuts”. Unfortunately, they are not real spending cuts at all, but simply very small reductions (2.4% to be exact) in the amount of the INCREASES in the budgets that each federal agency and department invariably receives each year. Each agency and department will actually have more money to spend in 2013 than they had in 2012, and in every year following through 2021 if nothing else changes.
The following quote is from the great article written by Veronique de Rugy which can be found at the link below:
“A further breakdown of the percentage of budget programs reveals that sequestration provides relatively small reductions in spending rates across the board. With sequestration, defense increases 15% (vs. 23%); nondefense discretionary increases 6% (vs. 12%); Medicare increases 62% (vs. 74%); and net interest increases 160% (vs. 179%).”
See:
http://mercatus.org/publication/federal-spending-without-sequester-cuts
Ms.de Rugy also has a neat Congressional Budget Office chart in the article that shows how little the federal spending increases will actually be affected over the next eight years.
It would be nice if the media would stop hiding the truth about the sequester, and inform the public that these “cuts” are not cuts at all, and that only zero baseline budgeting with an examination of ALL of the spending of each government agency and department, line by line, has any possibility of providing the real reductions in government spending that are needed to save our liberty, our country, and our economy. One example of a wasteful item that might be discovered through this process: The spending by the Obama Administration, of $400,000 for personal portraits of its department heads. No doubt, this has been done by all administrations, not just Obama, but it is a huge waste of tax dollars, and is just one small example of thousands of such wasteful projects. See: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/taxpayer-dollars-spent-on-o...
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