As Sequester Crisis Looms, Washington Lawmakers Fight...
As Sequester Crisis Looms, Washington Lawmakers Fight Over Nonsense
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...p_ref=politics
From article:
GOP complainants point to the account of the sequester's origins that are documented in Bob Woodward's book, The Price Of Politics, specifically a scene in which Jack Lew introduces the idea of the sequester to Harry Reid and other Democratic negotiators:
"We have an idea for the trigger," [then-Chief-of-Staff Jack] Lew said. "What's the idea?" Reid asked skeptically.
"Sequestration."
Reid bent down and put his head between his knees, almost as if he were going to throw up.
More recently, the president's allies have countered with a PowerPoint presentation, unearthed by The Daily Beast's John Avlon, that Boehner presented to House Republicans in an effort to get them to embrace the plan.
Now, Dave Weigel has many, many more details of both this big origin-story fight, and the actual origins of the sequester, so click on over and get some knowledge. Alternatively, you can have Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling explain it to you. Pick your poison! My point is this: This is the dumbest debate in the world to stage, at this time or any time, because there's really nothing to debate -- all the complainants are technically right, and the more important thing is that everyone already has a perfectly fine working understanding of how the sequester found its way into our lives.
But let's review! Anyone who has been paying attention to the overall budget battle, and who has a basic understanding of how a bill becomes a law, understands that the sequester's origins come from all sides, working in concert with one another. Regardless of who came up with the sequester [[and the salient thing to remember about Avlon's PowerPoint is that it does not prove that the sequester originated with the GOP), the facts are these. Lots of Republicans voted for the Budget Control Act. Their votes ensured that it came to Obama's desk. There, Obama signed it. And that's how laws are made.
More broadly, however, we can trace the actual origins of the sequester as the culmination of many years of legislative incompetence, which brought us to the point where everyone thought that the only way to resolve the impasse on the deficit was to hang the Sword of Damocles over the heads of a group of lawmakers that had to come to terms by a deadline or else -- whoosh! -- the sword falls and takes a heaping chunk out of the Pentagon's budget, along with a deadly slice from the domestic discretionary budget.
It went like this. There was a dream, it was called the Senate Deficit Commission. It died. It died because its GOP co-sponsors abandoned it in the eleventh hour. That might have been for the best -- by design, it required an almost-certainly insurmountable supermajority to pass any sort of "deficit plan." But because there was such a demand for some sort of "commission," President Obama went out and asked Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to chair a new committee. That committee would be bipartisan. It featured current lawmakers, and old wise heads. It, too, had an almost-certainly insurmountable supermajority requirement. It too, failed.
Billionaires for Austerity: With Cuts Looming, Wall Street Roots of "Fix the Debt"
Total duration 20 minutes:Attachment 18404Billionaires for Austerity: With Cuts Looming, Wall Street Roots of "Fix the Debt" Campaign Exposed
Quote:
With $85 billion across-the-board spending cuts, known as "the sequestration," set to take effect this Friday, a new investigation reveals how billionaire investors, such as Peter Peterson, have helped reshape the national debate on the economy, the debt and social spending. Between 2007 and 2011, Peterson personally contributed nearly $500 million to his Peter G. Peterson Foundation to push Congress to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Peterson's main platform has been the Campaign to Fix the Debt. While the campaign is portrayed as a citizen-led effort, critics say the campaign is a front for business groups. The campaign has direct ties to GE, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Peterson is the former chair and CEO of Lehman Brothers and co-founder of the private equity firm, the Blackstone Group. For more, we speak to John Nichols of The Nation and Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy.
