Thread: White House Sequestration cuts revealed - 11.1 bilion to Medicare none to foreign aid

The White House ,sneak it in on Friday, Document Dump.

They keep wanting to raise taxes - I suppose so we can continue paying for the Muslim Brotherhood nation building in the middle east.

Everything you need to know about budget 'sequestration' – except the consequences

The White House has reported on the $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts that are part of last year's debt ceiling deal. But how the cuts will impact individual programs remains unclear.

By David Grant | Christian Science Monitor – 09/15/2012

You can now go line by line in the federal budget and see just how deep the spending cuts slated for January will go thanks to a White House report released Friday on the impact of what’s known as “sequestration.”

What still isn’t there, however, is how the Selective Service (down 9.4 percent, or $2 million), managers for federal emergency food and shelter funding (down 8.2 percent, or $10 million) or operations and maintenance at the Marine Corps (down 9.4 percent, or $854 million) will actually cope with the reductions. How many fewer tents will the Federal Emergency Management Agency buy? How will the Marine Corps maintain its combat readiness? That’s all still unclear. “There will be some unintended consequences sooner or later,” says Pete Davis of Davis Capital Investment Ideas. “They’ve taken 8.2 percent out of embassy security which doesn’t seem like such a great idea right now…. What are you going to do if you’re building a ship and you’re going to take 9.4 percent out of it? It’s not like you can just buy 90 percent of a ship.”

RECOMMENDED: 'Fiscal cliff'? 'Sequester'? Your guide to Congress's code language.

Sequestration was the result of last summer’s debt ceiling deal, which cut $1 trillion in government spending over the next decade outright and then put responsibility for finding another $1.2 trillion on Congress.

Because Congress failed to agree on the mixture of lower spending and higher taxes to hit that figure, a mechanism in the debt ceiling-raising legislation causes automatic spending decreases to hit the $1.2 trillion figure: about $109 billion in lower government spending every year for the next decade. The report itself comes about a week after the statutory deadline from the Sequestration Transparency Act, one of the last pieces of legislation Congress passed before adjourning for its August break. That legislation ordered the administration to create a report detailing the outlines of the sequester. Overall, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget outlined the $109 billion in spending cuts for 2013 as follows: • Hits to defense programs of either 9.4 percent or 10 percent, depending on how they receive their appropriations from Congress ($55 billion).

• Payments to Medicare providers will be reduced by 2 percent ($11 billion).

• Cuts to non-defense spending (like elementary and secondary education or rehabilitation services and disability research) will be cut at either 8.2 percent or 7.6 percent (totaling $43 billion).

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of which budget lines see what reductions, the document does not carry the down-the-middle, dispassionate tone presented by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, say, or the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Instead, it frequently rips Republican plans to turn off the sequester at various points as “unbalanced,” “irresponsible,” unrealistic, unfair, and unreasonable. That tone reprised the same debate that the two parties have been having on Capitol Hill for months. Republicans on Capitol Hill released their own barrage in which they called the President’s leadership into question and criticized the report’s lack of granular description of exactly how the administration would cope with sequestration should it occur. “Although the sequestration report lacks detail, it makes glaringly clear that those programs most closely related to combat readiness of the force will be severely cut,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky in a statement. “And while the report claims that the President has offered ‘balanced and comprehensive deficit reduction’ solutions, his plan was so unserious that it was rejected by every single member of Congress.” The chairman of the House Republican conference, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas, concurred. “When it comes to averting this looming national defense crisis, President Obama has been AWOL – absent without leadership,” Representative Hensarling said in a statement. “Even though the sequester was originally concocted by his administration, the president could not even manage to meet last week’s legal deadline for explaining how he plans to implement these cuts, in violation of the law he signed just last month.” Democrats, on the other hand, again contended that the law which both parties profess to hate only lives on because the GOP will not bend on raising taxes. “It’s the American people who will pay the price for Republican intransigence,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, in a statement. “It’s time to stop the political games and start working together to prevent the sequester, protect the economic recovery, and get our fiscal house in order.” Outside the bounds of the report, Mr. Davis of Capital Investment Ideas points out, there are plenty of questions. What, exactly, will the funding levels for these programs be in 2013? That will be sorted out soon by a resolution funding the government through March, but what happens after that? Because the sequester doesn’t allow a reduction in personnel, what happens to budget lines that are 85 percent salary cost, Davis wonders. Because the sequester begins three months into the fiscal year (which begins Oct. 1), departments will have a higher level of funding authorized at the beginning of the year – and could keep spending at that level expecting the sequester to be turned off even if it does go into effect Jan. 1, Davis says. If that happens, these departments could be forced to “double and triple” their efforts to reduce spending toward the end of the year to get in line with the annual budget allotments. And so in many ways, the report leaves the discussion much as it found it: Everybody hates the sequester but nobody will do anything to make it go away. “No amount of planning can mitigate the significant impact of the sequestration,” the report reads. “The destructive across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration are not a substitute for a responsible deficit reduction plan.” And that means continued suffering for hiring and investment in both the public and private sectors as everyone continues to wonder how Washington will clean up its fiscal mess. “To have this much self-imposed uncertainty on business is just senseless,” Davis says. “Let alone this much uncertainty on the government.”
Everything you need to know about budget 'sequestration'

Congressional PDF on Foreign Aid to the Middle East
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL32260.pdf

New Administration Report Gives Few Details on Sequestration’s Military Cuts

Brian Slattery
September 14, 2012 at 5:55 pm

The White House is attempting to use the U.S. military as a bargaining chip to force Congress to raise taxes—the looming “sequestration” budget cuts were never supposed to happen, because Congress was supposed to come to a budget agreement.

Now the military faces deep, across-the-board cuts. The President has attempted to pass blame on the impending cuts to the House of Representatives, as it passed the bill that set sequestration in motion. However, as journalist and author Bob Woodward indicates in his new book, the Administration instigated the idea of the budgetary measure to gain political ground. Furthermore, the President’s own defense budget request would dramatically shrink the defense budget.

According to a congressionally mandated report released today—a week past the deadline—by the Obama Administration, discretionary national defense funding will be reduced by 9.4 percent under a regime of automatic spending cuts scheduled to start in January. Yet the report does not shed much light on what future forces will look like. Regardless of how the Obama Administration accounts for the cuts, the fact remains that it will severely undermine the military’s ability to protect the nation. (continues below chart)



The report results from bipartisan concern in Congress this summer about the impact of the crude enforcement component of last year’s debt ceiling agreement, the Budget Control Act. Its across-the-board “sequestration” was triggered when the congressional “super committee” failed to recommend any of the $1.2 trillion in 10-year deficit reduction that was required.

Until passage of the Sequester Transparency Act, which required today’s report, the Administration had been reticent on how the spending cuts would be implemented and what impact they would have.

The most crippling effect will be on national defense, which will absorb roughly half—$492 billion—of the mechanically driven cuts. Meanwhile, the badly designed mechanism protects the biggest drivers of federal deficits and debt from cuts: Social Security (which will spend an estimated $768 billion this year), Medicaid ($253 billion), and all but 2 percent of Medicare ($550 billion). Those three programs account for nearly 45 percent of total federal spending, yet they are all nearly untouched by sequestration—forcing deeper cuts in other areas.

The House Armed Services Committee has already illustrated sequestration’s effects, and they are bleak. The Navy will shrink to its lowest fleet size since 1915. The Air Force will be forced to operate with fewer fighters than at any point in its history. America will have a smaller ground force than at any point since 1940.

Unlike the Clinton Administration’s military drawdown, sequestration will weaken an already eroded force. While Clinton reduced the robust force built by the Reagan Administration, the current state of the U.S. military is far more vulnerable. The Air Force, Navy, and Army are each currently operating old, overused, and sometimes poorly protected equipment and weapons systems.

Lawmakers should not tout the Department of Defense as a massive jobs program. However, the skills, experience, and clearances required to build the greatest military in the world are sensitive to rapid changes in funding. A master welder working on a nuclear submarine has spent years to develop his or her craft; if such workers leave the industry, it takes years to replace them.

It doesn’t take a report from the White House to see how sequestration will harm national security. Congress needs to act quickly to reprioritize the defense cuts—without raising taxes—and uphold its constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense.

New Administration Report Gives Few Details on Sequestration's Military Cuts

and uphold its constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense.

Which, according to the US Constitution, is the first and foremost function of the Federal Government. Of course Obama does not follow the US Constitution on anything else, from bypassing Congress via executive orders, to spending money congress never authorized. We should not be surprised His priorities are clear: redistribute the wealth, hamstring our economy and military force, encourage more people to be dependent on the government and move as close to absolute rule and Communism. as he can.