Obama’s Sequestration Strategy – “I Hope They’re As Stupid As We Think”

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Barack ObamaBob WoodwardCongressional BudgetEconomyfederal budgetGovernment budget deficitsequesterSequestration

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Whatever actually happens with sequestration, it has revealed a deceptive, mean-spirited set of actions from the Obama administration, and the president himself—in the tone and words of his speeches.

The only explanation for the false draconian message being delivered by President Obama and his cabinet, is that he thinks the American people are stupid, or at least, easily deceived or bullied. Consider this:
The dreaded sequester that is supposed to end life in the USA as we know it, amounts to (maybe) a two percent cut in government spending. In fact, compared to last year, it is virtually no spending cut! However, you’ll never hear this kind of explanation from Barack Obama and his White House henchmen.

Instead, you heard from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that 5000 Air Traffic Controllers will need to be furloughed.  Since there are about 25,000 such positions involved, how does a 2% cut in funding turn into the need for 20% of the staff to be furloughed?

The same question must apply to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano’s claim that 5000 border agents would need to be sidelined, which out of a 20,000 person force, amounts to a 25% cut in staff (due to a 2% cut in funding?).

Since a majority of Americans bought his plea for four more years, “Forward” to a continuation of low economic growth, high deficits, and government giveaways, then maybe they are getting what they wanted. If that were the case, then any cuts would be bad news for them.

Here’s the rub. Government spending has grown over 30% in the past five years. Thanks to base-line budgeting, federal spending increased over last year, sufficiently enough, that the sequester cuts would barely affect most departments compared to their 2012 spending levels. But the country still operated in 2012, in fact with the Obama administration in charge. So what’s the big furor?  Nobody in the Obama media gang tells you this fact.

I’d bet the explanation, if Obama and his cabinet members had to take lie detector tests, is that the fearsome furloughs would be very short in duration; at most a few days in a year. If department budgets were managed with just a little intelligence, no furloughs at all would be needed, since most departments have at least a few percent of vacant jobs. Just don’t fill them right way.  These are not “new tricks” according to Slate.com:

…It’s true that, a year ago, the Pentagon projected that the budget for FY 2013 (at the time, two years out) would be $571 billion. Compared with that figure, the sum Panetta settles for ($525 billion) is $45 billion less. But last year’s actual FY 2012 budget was $531 billion. And compared with this figure, the proposal for FY 2013 is a cut of just $6 billion, or 1 percent. Caspar Weinberger pulled this trick all the time when he was Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary. He would insist that he was making drastic cuts by comparing his budget with what he’d projected it to be (sincerely or not) the year before—while, in fact, he was requesting massive increases.

Can Defense keep us safe with just over $500 billion? I hope so, since it has done so in recent years. But this time it will be “devastating” according to outgoing Secretary of Defense Panetta. Why? Because he “wanted” $571 billion!

To believe this furor, Americans must ignore the fact that any manager with half a brain could manage through a slight spending cut, but because this is the federal government involved, logic and common sense goes out the window. Too often, government leadership acts as if it only uses half a brain, doing the inexplicable across many departments to keep its wasteful bureaucracy growing.
Such nonsensical actions serve to prove that the cataclysmic results promised, could only happen “with intent to harm Americans,” and so they could be blamed on the GOP. Here’s the issue:
Barack Obama wants NO spending cuts. He wants MORE taxes so he can spend more money, and run up still larger deficits.
When there was an impasse over the budget ceiling, he had Jack Lew (the newly appointed Treasury secretary) sell the sequester to Harry Reid, with the idea that it would be too distasteful to the GOP. Mandated Defense Department cuts would be so unacceptable, that they would cave in and accept Obama’s wishes.
Now, a year later, Obama’s conveniently revisionist memory claims the GOP House created the sequester amidst plans to destroy the country, leave children, the poor and underprivileged without welfare, and force terrible hardships on Americans. Author Bob Woodward, who chronicled the dysfunctional debt ceiling debate in his book The Price of Politics, has already gone on the record that Barack Obama’s White House staff, Gene Sperling, was the architect of the sequestration. It makes all of us fearful of what kind of retribution the White House might use against those who merely point out factual inaccuracies and distortions.
The Obama administration’s positions and statements to the public are pure “scare-tactics” and “hogwash”—carefully crafted lies that can be sold to the gullible America people by the golden-tongued Obama. Americans are smarter than this—I hoped! I guess the big problem is that the smarter ones who are reading this already “get it,” and those who need to “get it” don’t read much. They either watch TV, or get 7-second sound bites from Obama’s mainstream media supporters.
Here’s your chance. Forward this to the people you know who wouldn’t ever see it, or read it, and challenge them to read the truth. I dare you, to “dare them!” After all, they aren’t as stupid as Obama hopes—I hope!

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