Well, actually Sen. McCaskill of MO has proposed just that.Originally Posted by flowerseverywhere
Well, actually Sen. McCaskill of MO has proposed just that.
In the last two years, there have been 27 congressional proposals to do that, but none of them passed. According to the linked HuffPo article "In the recent past, members of Congress have frequently offered to cut their own pay -- just like a cheapskate reaches for his wallet at the end of dinner knowing someone else reached first and will pay the tab."
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
Yes, of course, cause EVERYONE knows they check party affiliation before asking someone to take a 20% pay cut.....or reducing their food stamps. And hope you are on a airplane with democratic passengers, cause I'm thinking they will require a show of hands before they assign an air traffic controller.
Well, I'm guessing the teabaggers are happy. They wanted draconian cuts, and they're gonna get them. These 'low information' folks, who don't actually know anything about running a huge, modern country, kept screaming about 'drowning' the government in the bathtub. These anti-government, anti-women, anti-education tea baggers, who base their platform on Sarah Palin sound bites (you betcha!) should be dancing in the streets.
Grover Norquist is probably wetting himself with excitement!
Best as I can figure from the news is that the conservatives are not going to be happy until the cuts are in the entitlement programs of SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. It seems to me like it's coming down to either cutting back on these programs or having tax increases to cover them as they are. There is a middle ground that no one seems to want to visit. At least that's the long term choice that will avoid revisiting the issue every few months.
"what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver
Obama periodically floats proposals to cut Social Security and so on as well (the chained CPI etc..). How serious he is is anyone's guess, he's slippery.
Trees don't grow on money
In case you're interested in another opinion, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100476675/The...owth_Sequester
I think that the take-away from all this is that the administration will continue to mis-represent the "draconian" nature of these cuts in order to inflame "low information voters".The Obama administration is whipping up hysteria over the sequester budget cuts and their impact on the economy, the military, first providers, and so forth and so on. Armageddon. But if you climb into the Congressional Budget Office numbers for 2013, you see a much lighter and easier picture than all the worst-case scenarios being conjured up by the administration.
For example, the $85 billion so-called spending cut is actually budget authority, not budget outlays. According to the CBO, budget outlays will come down by $44 billion, or one-quarter of 1 percent of GDP (GDP is $15.8 trillion). What's more, that $44 billion outlay reduction is only 1.25 percent of the $3.6 trillion government budget.
So the actual outlay reduction is only half the budget-authority savings. The rest of it will spend out in the years ahead — that is, if Congress doesn't tamper with it.
And please remember that these so-called cuts come off a rising budget baseline in most cases. So the sequester would slow the growth of spending. They're not real cuts in the level of spending. (Not that a level reduction is a bad idea.)
Looking at the sequester in this light, it's clear that it won't result in economic Armageddon. In fact, I'll make the case that any spending relief is actually pro-growth. That's right. When the government spending share of GDP declines, so does the true tax burden on the economy. As a result, more resources are left in the free-market private sector, which will promote real growth.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
I am routinely trying to unravel the issues, but my read has been that he has implied to agree to some entitlement reductions as some sort of deal that would probably include tax increases. In a further fractioning of the parties, the democrats have told him to leave entitlements alone.
"House Democrats reiterated in the letter their "vigorous opposition to cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits in any final bill."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_2695257.html
"what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver
Yet the President offers compromise, even though the Republicans refuse to acknowledge it as such.
Just me, but I have a hard time labeling a 2% cut draconian.
"Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"
Short of a mutually-accepted refuting the entirety of a 205 page document (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/defa...assets/ccs.pdf) such criticisms are easily dismissed as partisan perspective. The reality is you want more cuts, and folks on the far left more fewer cuts.
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