Oh, what a marvel of efficiency is the federal government. Most organizations that spend $3.8 trillion in a year are probably wasting at least a small portion of it, but the federal government has apparently gone about it with such frugality and cost-effectiveness that cutting a mere $44 billion will result in all sorts of calamities.
If the Republicans don’t immediately agree to a “fair” and “balanced” policy of soaking the rich even further, President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, he will have no choice but to institute the painful spending cuts required by the “sequester” agreement. Even before Friday’s deadline illegal immigrants were being released from custody, nightmarish air travel conditions were being threatened, and Obama was telling a shipyard full of anxious workers that he would be forced to choose between “funding for the disabled kid or the poor kid.” Elsewhere the White House was warning that sequestration would mean meat plants would be unable to ship beef for a lack of food inspectors, hurricanes and tornadoes will go undetected because weather satellites aren’t being launched, “special needs” students will be denied an education, leaking underground storage tanks will continue to leak, criminals will run amok with guns they obtained because background checks were halted, poor children will be denied the dubious benefits of Head Start, home weatherization subsidies will halt, and drugs will become less intelligent as the National Drug Intelligence Center loses $2 million of funding.
That last item isn’t so very worrisome, given that the National Drug Intelligence Center ceased to exist last summer, and the end of home weatherization subsidies will likely go unnoticed, as did the existence of the program, but the rest of it sounds just awful. Although the government assures that the released illegal immigrants are “non-criminal,” other than the crime of being in the country illegally, it is frightening to consider that Obama now has a fiscal excuse for failing to secure the border. Air travel is already nightmarish enough, and even if the Federal Aviation Administration is now handling less traffic with more employees than in the recent past we take Obama’s threat to make it worse very seriously. We’re against leaking underground storage tanks and amok-running criminals on principle, and as Kansans we are eager for tornado detection and absolutely horrified at the prospect of being relegated to a vegetarian diet. We’d also hate to choose between disabled kids and poor kids, both of them being so darned cute, so the president certainly has our sympathy.
Those top-hatted, moustache-twirling Republicans leave the president with no other options, however, as everything else in the federal budget seems to be more essential than even poor kids, disabled kids, poor disabled kids, and beef. The past election made clear that it would be unthinkable to cut subsidies to the Sesame Street producers, despite the gazillions they rake in, and Sen. Harry Reid has made clear the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nevada, is sacrosanct, and no one dare take that scary Cleveland woman’s Obamaphone away, so surely the kindest cuts are the ones the president has proposed.
Obama’s many fans will be relieved to learn that his own salary and generous package of perquisites have been protected from any budget-slashing, and we hope this will offer some comfort to those poor and disabled kids. The more-costly-than-expected Obamacare program will stay in place, and its accompanying Medicare cuts will go on schedule, too, and fans of big government can be assured that spending is still up over the past four years. Even in these troubled times, there must be priorities.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 