Sequester This, Boehner!

Republicans like to portray President Obama as a big government spender, despite the fact that government spending under Obama has grown at its slowest pace since the Eisenhower administration. 

The GOP is also trying to pretend the spending cuts that Obama has signed into law over the last two years simply didn’t happen.

Check out how discretionary spending has gone down..

In fact, under its current trajectory, non-defense discretionary spending — everything from education to food safety to transportation to housing to veterans’ benefits — will hit historic lows in the next decade, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden showed in the charts in this article.

 

If the so-called “sequester” comes into force in March, which House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says it will, domestic spending will fall even more. “Instead of totaling 3.2 percent of GDP in 2017, non-defense discretionary spending would total less than 3 percent of GDP and would be on its way down to 2.6 percent by 2022. This is less than two-thirds of what was previously its lowest level.

Most galling is the GOP insistence that the sequester "is Obama's idea", as if Obama wanted it to pass. This is a straight up denial of reality (and if you know this but still say it to people as if it were the truth, it's what we call 'a LIE').

Obama, and other rational people  thought no one would be cruel enough to actually let these cuts happen. He failed to recognize the depths of hatred the right wing holds for him and the level of their contempt for government. Not to mention their willingness to hurt thousands or even millions of people in order to protect the greedy money-grubbing of the top income-takers.

There are legitimate reasons to slow spending, but there is precious little evidence that drastically cutting spending will do anything other than hurt an already anemic recovery.