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We live in the midst of a US National lakeshore - with 2,000,000++ tourists in the summer
They are not that organized. They come up here with no idea of where they are going to stay, of where the restaurants are, where the different becahes or places are....
If they can check ona hotel, they are not gonna check on whether the park is open.
The President is blowing the situation out of proportion to fire up the lunatic left, just like he has in every false emergancy he has created during hsi administration.
There is no need to attack air traffic control when there is plenty of waste in other areas of the budget to cut first. But the Demcorats know that if cuts are made where they should be... NO ONE WOULD NOTICE. And that does not help their agenda to grow government so they need to make the cuts where it hurts the middle and lower income communities.
Social Security has its own tax and its own Trust Fund that is independent of the rest of the budget. Social Security is an INSURANCE program. Young workers pay into the program and retirees and disabled get insurance payments.
SS and the SSTF are used to hide the accounting, but the impact is clear if you compare On Budget with Off Budget numbers. SS is completely solvent for a generation. Improvement in the economy, changes in immigration, &c may make the worst case predictions not come true with no changes. It is silly to make changes now for a problem that may not even occur decades into the future.
Almost the entire budget problem is due to a bloated health care system that costs too much for what it delivers. The short term deficits are a non issue. Borrowing at interest rates lower than inflation is not a problem. (Wish I could do that.) The only problem that makes a big difference is future health care spending.
BS did NOT focus on fixing health care spending. BS FAILED to correctly identify the problem so they tried to solve the wrong problem.
The USFS and Park Services spend billions upon billions subsidizing logging and mining, protecting private homes from wildfire, running research services, and transferring money to concessionaires via sweetheart deals.
The cost of running the facilities is a drop in the bucket.
The threat to curtail hours is pure cynical theater, a trick they learned from the Pentagon.
You don't hear them threatening not to build roads for loggers or fight fires in the urban interface.
I'm glad to see a number of stories come out questioning why, if Bowles-Simpson is purely a deficit reduction plan, it contains significant tax rate reductions across the board. The answer, of course, is that much of B-S is ideology masquerading as non-partisan deficit reduction.
The United States has a jobs and unemployment crisis, not a deficit crisis. Bowles-Simpson, like its authors, manages the impressive feat of being both misguided and irrelevant.
Now that the Bowles-Simpson "commission" is just them, we can say it's a purified BS plan.
Two things. Exactly why doesn't social security have anything to do with debt/deficit? It's a budget line item just like anything else correct? Also, I agree the report favored the GOP way of thinking which is why I'm confused that GOP members voted against. I'm guessing because of the deep defense cuts which it called which isn't in line with GOP idealogy.
The BS commission called for a combination of things, including making the Bush tax cuts permanent & cuts to "entitlements," including Social Security. Yet tax cuts are not consonant with reducing the deficit & debt (unless you buy into the GOP's bogus notion that tax cuts pay for themselves with higher GDP growth, which has never been supported by the evidence). And Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit/debt, so why on earth was it included in the package? The BS commission package always looked to me more like a political deal (and one tilted in favor of the GOP) than a budgetary/economic one.
Here's a question purely to better understand exactly what happened with the B-S commission. Was the report useless because of it's substance or the fact that it didn't get enough votes to be formerly recommended? I ask because, although it will be a hard pill to swallow, isn't cuts in the defense budget needed to reign in the yearly budget deficits?
Bowles-Simpson was BS in 2010 and it is BS now. Why not be blunt and tell the truth? Afraid of the truth?
Easy, lad. There are right ways and wrong ways to say "I was right". Even when you're right.
Which is exactly as intended. The sequester could be managed so that few people notice much difference, but politics being what they are means that the reductions will be handled in such a way to as to impose the maximum level of discomfit possible in order to arrange pressure to undo the cuts.
If the National Park Service can post the service disruptions on the Internet in advance, most people (well, I) could plan around the cuts.
The Washington Monument has been closed since August, 2011, due to earthquake damage. Of course, the sequester will probably delay the completion of repairs, which are ongoing.
I wouldn't get very excited about the 2014 Budget process when such a lot of important work remains to get the federal government through 2013. Granted, they should have made just a clean surrender on the debt ceiling (which close to all them now recognize would have been poison to hold onto) without the jibberish of the Senate passing budgets.
GOP reminds me of the guy in the squad who keeps yelling brave slogans, attack, attack he says, yet when the call for attack comes, and you pop up from your foxhole, you look back at he's headed the other way.
Article 1, Section 7 states "A bills for raising revenues shall originate in the House of Representatives" (emphasis is obviously mine). As far as I know, the word "budget" doesn't appear in the US Constitution.
If you're referring to a revenue increase in a sequester alternative bill, that should originate in the House based on this provision. But the easy way to get around that it for the Senate to take up a House-passed bill, and amend it to include the revenue provisions. Or it could pass a revenue increase and then say it had called Boehner's bluff.
Last time I checked, U.S. budgets must originate in the House.
You write, and I understand: "Quite frankly, I'd trade downsizing the Federal workforce 10% through attrition plus the phased in 5% increase in my retirement benefits if the politicians could just stop putting a "gun to my head" over this decent middle class job I have which happens to barely support my family."
But this is the wrong way to think. Because no you can't afford to have fewer co-workers (depends on what agency you work for, of course, but look at how SS office hours are now pitiful and many other examples) nor to lose the 5% at this "decent middle class job that happens to barely support my family." But most of all because it would NOT stop there, yes you have been kicked around till you just are begging for it to stop, but if you reward this stuff and say, do these bad things if you will just stop this -- they INCREASE. There isn't any limit to how much those who want to punish the middle class will continue to want to do so . . . so don't encourage them.
I am a Director of a Rural Senior Center, we provide Home Delivered Meals, Congregate Meals and Information and Assistance, what does this mean for our funding, We are in Illinois and as we all know our state is in quit a mess. My funding has been cut to where we are receiving 1/4 of our monies, this is not enough to keep our doors open. My concern is for my clients, what do they have to look forward in the upcoming months? My clients depend on these programs.
They are called Conference Committees when the House and Senate meet to hash out - or reconcile - different versions of a bill.
It's true they don't get signed by the President or have the force of law. Really, they are more like the rules of the House and Senate in that they create automatic points of order, but those can be appealed to the Chair or waived anyway.
I think the point Anon at 6:52pm was making isn't that the President would veto the bill, but rather he uses his influence with Reid to keep the bill off the floor until he supports it.
@Anon (2/11 3:10pm ): I've done this for a living for many years, too.
There can be value in a chamber passing a budget that isn't then reconciled with the other body.
First, as I noted, it can force the issue on tough votes that will then show up in countless elections later.
Second, in the past, budget's have been deemed to be reconciled for at least that chamber's point of orders and budget rules. In effect, they are in effect, at least until a compromised version is reached. This doesn't always happen, but it can. It's happened more often in the House than the Senate.
Finally, all the cards will be laid bare. We'll know what the Senate Dem leadership thinks in the right revenue and expense levels. We'll know what level of deficit they are willing to defend and we'll finally have something to match up against the Ryan and other House plans. It's easy to poke holes and demonize when there is nothing to contrast in return, which is of course why they've avoided introducing or passing anything.
As someone who is facing a 20% pay cut due to the sequestration, I have one issue. Neither party cared about the $50B in Hurricane Sandy disaster. That could cancel half of sequestration. The "doc fix" is estimated to be $30B, yet, they didn't care about offsetting or keeping that in. It's the same thing you've pointed out over and over again... people wring their hands over the deficit, but no one wants to pay for it. So they minimize and specialize the targets.
Quite frankly, I'd trade downsizing the Federal workforce 10% through attrition plus the phased in 5% increase in my retirement benefits if the politicians could just stop putting a "gun to my head" over this decent middle class job I have which happens to barely support my family.
I bet mid-March, early April the Senate will move, pass a bill with 70-80 supporters and it'll be interesting to see what the House does.
I find it funny that the most liberal democrats were championing the tax increases in January, talking about how if they do nothing their party will win politically and taxes get raised on those at $250k. When the fiscal cliff deal was cut they complained hard. I think those on the right side talking about how if they do nothing they can win politically need to see what happened... the Democrats gave in and compromised. They didn't keep the hard line...
The agencies have a function when rating obscure debt. When rating well known debt like US treasuries, they don't add any value. Last time, they downgraded, the market yawned and interest rates actually went down.