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What is The Sequester?
Jun 10,
2013 - By Staff Writer
We all have heard about "The Sequester",
but how many of us really know what it is?
The Sequester, should
not be taken lightly, it is referred to by the White House as
"Harmful automatic budget cuts — known as the sequester — threaten
hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cut vital services for children,
seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in
uniform. These cuts will make it harder to grow our economy and
create jobs by affecting our ability to invest in important
priorities like education, research and innovation, public safety,
and military readiness."
President Obama and both parties in Congress have been working together for the last few years to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion looking into spending cuts and tax rate increases. But after all these years of discussions and negotiations, they could not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit, and in 2011 Congress passed a law saying that "if they couldn’t agree on a plan to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion — including the $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction lawmakers in both parties have already accomplished over the last few years — about $1 trillion in automatic, arbitrary and across the board budget cuts would start to take effect in 2013"
Congress has not compromised, and as a result, the harmful cuts "known as the sequester" began March 1. The White House stated that these cuts will "jeopardize our military readiness and eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research, and don’t take into account whether they eliminate some bloated program that has outlived its usefulness, or cut a vital service that Americans depend on every single day."
President Obama further stated that “The whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth. And so this was all designed to say we can't do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration."