Grown Up Obama Tries to Reason With Republican Children On the Sequester

Last updated on March 6th, 2013 at 09:19 am

The President called the naughty Republican children to the big house today for a final attempt at reason on the sequester, probably to no avail.

The AP reports that the President will use Friday’s meeting to “spell out his 10-year, $1.5 trillion deficit reduction plan in a face-to-face meeting with congressional allies and adversaries.”

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But the AP also thinks that the President is stuck between liberals, conservatives and Republicans who won’t budge. From where I’m sitting, that’s one for Democrats and two for Republicans. Perhaps if liberals came up with a caucus like the Tea Party, they too could get away with digging in their heels twice on every issue.

The AP writes that Obama’s efforts may fail because “Many conservatives are willing to accept the automatic cuts as the only way to reduce government spending, even though the budget knife cuts into cherished defense programs. Likewise, many liberals are beginning to embrace the cuts as a way to protect revered big benefit programs that have long been identified with the Democratic Party.”

Yet, Business Insider did a poll that showed that the majority of people do not support the sequestration cuts, and in fact, of all alternative sequestration cut proposals, the one favored the most by Republicans and Democrats was the Progressive Caucus’ version.

The House Progressive Caucus plan replaces the entire sequester with a new plan with equivalent savings. It accomplishes this by ending subsidies to fossil fuel companies, closing several tax loopholes, cutting the corporate meal and entertainment tax deduction at 25 percent, and enacting a 28 percent limit on certain tax deductions and extensions.

The polling company for Business Insider took the party affiliation off of the plans so people had to judge by the content. It turned out that once again, Americans prefer liberal ideas. They just don’t know it. Gosh, how did that happen? Whose agenda has it been to fool Americans into voting against their own interests?

Not only that, but the Republican House version got a majority NO THANKS.

Read the whole survey here:

BI/Surveymonkey Sequestration poll Results by whickey9402

So no, Americans aren’t looking forward to the sequester cuts and there’s no amount of trying to make it so that will skew this reality for the press/Republicans.

With the deficit shrinking at its fastest pace since World War II (before the fiscal cliff drama), you have to wonder why Republicans refuse to deal with the real crisis: The unemployment crisis.

Economists agree on one thing: This isn’t the time for austerity. And it sure as heck isn’t the time for draconian, harsh, sudden, blind and un-planned cuts per the sequester. Of course, those cuts were never meant to happen.

They are, by design, horrible and awful, so horrible and awful that no sane representative would allow them to take place. This sense of patriotism would drive said representative to the table to – say it with me – compromise with the other side.

Of course, we don’t have the luxury of presuming the sanity of House Republicans. So we continue on the crazy path, chasing down Bob Woodward’s imaginary threats and buying into the narrative that the real emergency is the deficit. All of this is wrapped up nicely in tin foil and put under the media’s “we’re a center right” country tree even though actually, poll after poll shows people like liberal and even Democratic socialist ideas. They just don’t like the name.

It was all fine and good for Republicans to believe Fox News and skew polls when the only people they were hurting was their own candidates. But now they have the fate of the nation in their crosshairs.

Sarah Jones

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