Why I’m rooting FOR the sequestration crisis
Feb 26, 2013, 12:29 AM | Updated: 5:59 am
Dori writes…
Every few weeks, we have a manufactured federal government crisis. Last month it was fiscal cliff. This month it’s sequestration. Both sides tell us it’s going to be quite the disaster.
In fact, the White House tells us the sequestration cuts will impact us in these areas JUST IN WASHINGTON STATE ALONE. OMG!
We’re going to lose $11 million in school funding! $3 million in clean air and clear water protection! $271,000 for law enforcement! $661,000 for job searching!$642,000 for public health! And on and on it goes.
So, if this happens on Friday, we’re going to become a bunch of uneducated, polluted, lawless, unemployed losers!
Funny, while the federal government is threatening all of those things that are important to people, they haven’t threatened to cut funding for any of these programs that they spent money on last year:
#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between $16 and $20 million helping students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior.”
#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.
#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?
#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.
#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.
#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.
#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs – and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program.”
There are 20 more items for this list in the above link. Funny they don’t threaten to cut any of those items. No, instead they threaten vaccinations for children.
Here’s the truth of the sequestration cuts. Our federal government is at least triple the size of what it needs to be. It’s about 100 times the size of what the founding fathers envisioned as the role of the federal government.
With the exception of the people who would have their bloated government jobs eliminated or cut back, a 2 percent budget cut on Friday would have zero impact on the life of almost every other American. While the politicians are predicting gloom and doom, you would see that it has no negative effect.
So let all the doomsayers predict calamity. I’m rooting FOR sequestration.