You might never spot an air marshal on your flight, but it's reassuring to know one might be there. In a few weeks, though, many of them are likely to get pink slips — along with food safety inspectors, border patrol agents and countless other government employees who play a crucial if hidden role in everyone's lives.
Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
These and many other cuts to important programs like child nutrition and low-income housing are part of a giant buzz saw known as the sequester, which will indiscriminately slash $100 billion in discretionary spending beginning in January and will continue for nine years.
The cuts, mandated by the 2011 budget agreement, would not affect entitlement programs like Social Security, and have not received the same attention as the tax increases that are also scheduled to take effect in January. They are the rarely discussed part of the so-called fiscal cliff, and negotiators have little time left to prevent their impact. But all signs suggest that Republicans remain unrelenting in their insistence on preserving the full amount of the cuts, and adding many billions more.
The slogan that Republicans have relentlessly repeated on every talk show, and that Speaker John Boehner invoked Thursday — Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem — may sound superficially appealing to weary taxpayers, but those who mouth it never bother to give details on what their budget-cutting demands really mean. It is not an abstraction, like their vague calls for "entitlement cuts." None of these brave budget-cutters want to go on television and say, cut the F.B.I. Or cut the Border Patrol. Or cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that's exactly what they're doing by insisting on slashing discretionary spending. Republicans are so afraid of this reality that they won't even detail their demands for cuts to the White House in the fiscal-cliff talks, instead waiting for President Obama to go first so they won't be stuck with the blame.
The sequester cuts were balanced between domestic and military programs, to spread the pain evenly. The Republicans have sought to move all the cuts to the domestic side and make the president do the dirty work of choosing which popular programs go on the block.
"Where are the president's spending cuts?" Mr. Boehner asks, without mentioning any of his own. But Mr. Obama already agreed to more than $1.5 trillion in cuts last year that will extend for a decade. In exchange, Republicans agreed to exactly nothing, except not to default on the nation's credit last year, a threat they are preparing again for 2013. White House officials are hoping that if a deal is reached combining higher tax revenues with some of the spending cuts the president has already proposed, Republicans will agree to postpone or vastly reduce the unpopular sequester. If they do not, and the country finds itself without vital services, the public will know exactly whom to hold responsible.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Editorial: Pain Ahead if the U.S. Goes Off the ‘Fiscal-Cliff’
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2012/12/editorial-pain-ahead-if-us-goes-off.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Editorial: Pain Ahead if the U.S. Goes Off the ‘Fiscal-Cliff’
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Editorial: Pain Ahead if the U.S. Goes Off the ‘Fiscal-Cliff’
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar