The Case for Across-the-Board Spending Cuts

It's not new...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa...t_Syndrome

I feel like the best way to respond to something like this is to fire the person who makes that decision.

"Already some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending.”

“These cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction -- people will lose their jobs."

True leadership would create a prioritized list and then start cutting from the bottom. For the politician, the bottom is their special projects and pork, therefore they go for the across the board cuts to spare the fat and special projects, projects that most would agree don't need funding.

When the White House and Republicans had a showdown over the debt ceiling in 2011, they set up the sequester as something of a poison pill -- budget cuts that would be so harmful they would force both sides to make a deal. Adapting a process first outlined in a 1985 law, they defined the rules this way:

"Except as otherwise provided, the same percentage sequestration shall apply to all programs, projects, and activities within a budget account (with programs, projects, and activities as delineated in the appropriation Act or accompanying report for the relevant fiscal year covering that account, or for accounts not included in appropriation Acts, as delineated in the most recently submitted President’s Budget)."

That means the cuts are pretty much across-the-board, which means the sequester "is indeed indiscriminate," said Ronald M. Levin, a law professor at Washington University School of Law.

John F. Cooney, a Washington lawyer who led the legal team that implemented a federal sequester under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, concurs.

Across the board cuts is a cowards way to run a business or gov't. Not all services are equal.

Using the same tactics as local city or state does when it needs more money, the police, fire, libraries and parks are always going to see drastic cuts. This causes the naive person to support the new taxes such that those things don't get cut.

On the federal level, we've heard the fear mongering of long airport lines, 800,000 defense contractors lay'd off, cuts to national parks, etc.

True leadership would create a prioritized list and then start cutting from the bottom. For the politician, the bottom is their special projects and pork, therefore they go for the across the board cuts to spare the fat and special projects, projects that most would agree don't need funding.

[url]If the cuts are such a bad thing.. why'd he threaten to veto any congressional attempt to remove them?

For those chanting "cut defense spending", you are completely clueless.

Obama is a serial liar. Now that Bob Woodward is acknowledging that, I wonder if the Obamabots will, too.