Sanity, or Genocide by Sequestration?
The Unhived Mind [UHM]
Sanity, or Genocide by Sequestration?
October 15, 2013 • 8:52PM
http://larouchepac.com/node/28559
The status quo ante that Congress and the White House are supposedly trying to get the nation back to, is the road to genocide by sequestration. As Walter Pincus put it more politely in today’s Washington Post, “Lurking behind the government shutdown and debt limit battle is the sequester. That’s the Frankenstein-like budget-cutting monster Congress created in 2011.”
When the “supercommittee” set up by the 2011 Budget Control Act couldn’t agree on draconian cuts, the Act mandated automatic, “sequester,” cuts. Even if the Federal government is opened back up and the debt ceiling is raised, the next round of the cuts is to go into effect Jan. 15.
That threat is now being used to try to break the back of enough Congressmen so that they will accept genocidal reductions in Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements, which neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations have yet been politically able to ram through Congress, try though they have.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who in May introduced the Senate companion bill to H.R. 129, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, in remarks prepared for delivery today on the Senate floor, noted some of the effects of the next round of sequestration cuts: 177,000 fewer children would get Head Start services than under the Senate bill that passed the Senate Appropriations Committee in July; 1.3 million fewer students would get Title I education assistance; 760,000 fewer households would receive home heating and cooling assistance through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program known as LIHEAP; Federal funds for special education would be cut. State and local would be left to find some other way to support more than 9,000 special education staff in classrooms around our nation. A year-long Continuing Resolution (CR) includes $291 million less than the Senate bill for child care subsidies for working families. A year-long CR includes less than half of the funding to go after fraud and abuse in Medicare. This program recovers $7.90 on average for every $1 Congress appropriates. We would be foregoing more than $2.7 billion in recovered funds to the Treasury. And a year-long CR is $2 billion less for the National Institutes of Health, which translates to 1,300 fewer research grants.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Pincus notes, said on the House floor last week that $38.7 billion was cut out of the 2013 non-military budget. As just one consequence of that, 57,000 children nationwide were cut from Head Start.
If the sequester continues, the House’s fiscal 2014 military figure would have to come down $47.9 billion, and the Senate’s would have to drop $54.1 billion, according to the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, which Pincus cites. Subsequently, the Center says, “the impact of the defense sequester…will double in fiscal 2014 and triple in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2013.”
http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress3/2013/10/17/sanity-or-genocide-by-sequestration/