It is frustrating to hear so many ignorant people blame the president for the sequester. Congress decides on the budget and the President's only role in this is that he will not approve a worse budget where all budget cuts are made on the backs of the poor and middle class as Congress desires. The fault belongs to Congress and the President should not be blamed for not caving to their desire to exacerbate a corporately controlled caste system in America.
That being said, the sequester is awful. Again, many in Congress are trying to shrug off this result of their refusal to compromise as no big deal - it's just 9% cuts domestically. Programs should be able to handle that, they say. They seem to be missing the fact that the across-the-board nature of the cuts makes them ever so much more difficult than that sounds. If I had to cut nine percent out of my household budget, we'd stop eating out and buying breakfast tacos and coffee and books and we would pare our grocery budget down to beans and rice (or probably potatoes, since the girls dislike rice) and apples, supplemented by the fruit and greens that I grow in the yard. We would not stop paying nine percent of our mortgage. The details matter.
It also matters that we are coming out of the Great Recession and many people are still unemployed or underemployed and our education and social services budgets have already been mercilessly gutted so more cuts are pretty untenable.
In Texas, where our schools have been stripped to the bone already, we are looking at losing about $67.8 million in funding for primary and secondary education. We are also looking at losing millions in nutrition assistance and public health funding. And that's just a small portion of the cuts.
It's scary.
I hope Congress decides to think of more than just the rich Americans soon.
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