As predicted, sequester cuts become a problem only when they inconvenience 1) the wealthy, 2) the media and 3) members of Congress. Take for example the FAA. As you may know, the Federal Aviation Administration works seven days a week to keep our airplanes from colliding with each other and/or exploding. In exchange for this valuable service we pay them. If we give them less money we must either a) put fewer planes in the air, or b) accept that a certain number of planes will land on something other than the wheels. The FAA sensibly chose option (a) in spite of and perhaps because it might inconvenience members of Congress. As also predicted this spurred immediate action.
….”We have to admit that some things are very problematic,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who on Wednesday introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) designed to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility to manage the cuts with the goal of reducing furloughs at the FAA….Another Democrat, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, on Wednesday announced legislation that would reinstate air-traffic controllers using funds generated by ending a tax break for corporate jets. Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware said he would prefer to generate additional user fees to keep the travel system running at full capacity for the next five months.
“The public’s going to be furious when they find out that this could have been prevented,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R., Ind.), who supports the bipartisan proposal to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility in dealing with the FAA cuts. The aviation agency has said it can’t avoid furloughs in the course of complying with the mandated budget cuts.
To summarize, Congress plans to let the FAA squeeze the balloon a little and let the suck bulge out in some other part of air traffic safety. Anyone care to guess where? Counsel calls on Jerry Moran, Republican Senator from Kansas.
Senate consideration of a bill to fund the federal government through September ground to a halt Tuesday when a freshman Republican from Kansas insisted on a full 60 hours of debate after he wasn’t allowed to bring up an amendment that would keep rural airports operating.
[…] The Kansan wants to restore $50 million in funding for control towers for more than 180 airports serving primarily rural areas around the country. The money was part of the across-the-board spending cuts that began on March 1; without the $50 million, most of the airports—including seven in Kansas—will shut down on April 7, according to a Moran aide. The senator is pushing for a vote that would find $50 million elsewhere in the Federal Aviation Administration’s budget.
Far be it from me (cough) to tell Harry Reid how to run his popsicle stand (COUGH COUGH), but I’d like to see him give Moran his bill as a rider to Klobuchar-Hoeven and send that to the FAA. It might be the last straw that pushes that cartoon bill from Schoolhouse Rock to kneel in the rotunda, pour gasoline on his head and strike a match.
***
And of course.
mellowjohn
actually, categories (b) and (c) mentioned in the first para both fit nicely into category (a).
Just Some Fuckhead
You should have included a Venn diagram for 1) wealthy , 2) media and 3) congress above. Hint: it’s one circle.
ChrisB
MSNBC just reported that when a flight was delayed for about three hours the other day the pilot got on the intercom and told the passengers that “they could blame President Obama for this.”
Walker
Sigh. This is an argument I have a lot with my wife. She is a general aviation pilot and on the board of our local flying club. Our tower is slated to close. She and the board are engaging all these congress people to keep the tower open.
And I keep pointing out that, unless you tell these congress people to address the sequester, they are wasting their time. I don’t care how much our Republican representative says he supports the tower. His support is worthless.
Suffern ACE
Without planes, how can we expect headline grabbing star reporters to fly across the country at a moment’s notice and get very little information correct?
jibeaux
So, Coats’ argument is “Boy the public is sure going to mad when they find out what we’ve done and what you haven’t tried to clean up and minimize to the best of your ability by asking us for help!” Do I have that about right, we’re blaming the FAA for sequester cuts to the FAA?
aimai
Just nauseating. But you can tell from the comment threads that whenver the sequester is brought up it has been subject to the same demagoguery and inability to add or use logic that the rest of the US budget has been subject to. The right wing and the citizenry insist that there is so much obvious “waste/fraud/abuse” in every government agency that the sequesetor should have had no obvious effect on “the real people.” The fact that it is harming real people–even upper class people–is a sign that someone in power made a mistake, didn’t make “the right” choices. Its all the Republican party’s fault but the Democrats share part of the blame for not making the argument that the government is not, in fact, a badly run family household economy that is wasting money hand over fist. We needed to make the argument more successfully (not more forcefully, I think tht was tried) but more successfully that in fact our budgets w/r/t police, fire/faa/food stamps/health care was actually not overblown. More people mean more needs. Recession means more needs.
Instead we got the Democrats and the President arguing the other side–I realize they thought they would jiu jitsu it somehow and when the President would say, soothingly “the country is like a family and we all have to pull our belts in a little tighter” he didn’t really mean it. But it left the dopes in our country thinking there was some fat that couldb e trimmed like the countrywide equivalent of not renting so many videos, or not buying premium ice cream.
grandpa john
@Walker: If he supported the sequester, then he is simply doing what repubs are taught to do, LIE.
Schlemizel
In my own sad little way I am thrilled to see Amy as a driving force on this. She has been a massive disappointment from her swearing in onward. I’d hate to think she would ever do the right thing and I’d have to consider that she is not a gigantic waste of real estate.
She will be a Senator as long as she want though, warming a seat that once belonged to a giant of a man. She has mastered the art of appealing to to the “low information voters” and will never stick her neck out no matter how much the nation might need her. Her legacy will be “not as bad as Lieberman” There is something to take pride in!
jibeaux
@aimai: Personally, I think every time someone compares the economy of the United States to a household budget, somewhere a kitten dies.
Cynthia Dudley
This is where Canada’s higher airline fees become less problematic. The higher cost of an airplane ticket is largely because the cost of air traffic control and airport maintenance is rolled into the cost of the ticket and not a part of the federal budget. So those choosing to fly pay the cost of not falling out of the air in a screaming ball of fire and not those who pack the kids in the car to go see the grandparents.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
Now would be a good time to re-introduce the American Jobs Act with a revision to end the sequester in one of two ways:
1) just repeal it in its entirety without paying for it
or
2) pay for it with a per-stock transaction tax of a nickel per share.
Then push for it as hard as we can saying that the Dems are the only ones who have a real plan to end the pain.
Zifnab
@jibeaux: The FAA just needs to learn how to do more with less. If you can’t staff a control tower with two guys working part-time for minimum wage, then you clearly aren’t doing your jobs.
Villago Delenda Est
The solution to this problem is really very simple.
Tax the living shit out of the top 1%, and it’s solved.
Villago Delenda Est
@ChrisB:
President Obama can’t do shit when Congress are the ones who imposed the sequester. This is how our government works.
Seanly
@ChrisB:
I was delayed an hour coming home from Chicago a couple of weeks ago. The pilot said we could thank the federal government. I was glad he didn’t go into full anti-Obama rant. I missed my connection & ended up being stuck in Phoenix for the night. That cost the project I was working on an extra $68 for the hotel.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
That would solve virtually every problem in the economy, beginning with the goddamn deficit they’re always whining about. Sadly, it’s unacceptable on theological grounds.
Frankensteinbeck
This is the most Republican statement ever. The problem didn’t exist until it happened to people they know. Those people they know are now ‘the public’. Do you think this might have been deliberate, the famous 11 dimensional chess? Tinkering with the effects of bad policy until the Village feels it is the only way to make the Village understand it’s bad policy.
MomSense
@jibeaux:
One of my pet peeves is that stupid comparison especially since families go into debt all the time for things like cars, homes, education, medical care. People take on debt out of necessity sometimes and because they perceive that it is a good investment.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: I know you already know this, but the dopes in this country have been convinced that much if not most of what the government spends is waste and corruption for at least 32 years. And I totally agree with your description of the logic: “if [policy X] is hurting me it must be some kind of mistake or deliberate harm, because the problem isn’t spending money on me and people like me, it’s spending on Them, the ones getting a free ride.”
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
If only it were possible to go after waste and corruption in the defense industry.
ericblair
@ChrisB:
I think there are a lot of wingnut pilots for the same reason there are a lot of wingnut doctors (and wingnut engineers, although I is one). You’ve got intelligent, competent people who have to spend a high fraction of their life dedicated to a rather narrow technical task who need a lot of self-confidence to operate. They’re likely to not be well informed about other parts of life just due to time pressure, and have the intelligence and self-confidence to make wrong and sweeping conclusions about the stuff they don’t know.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense: But that’s why it can be a useful comparison despite the differences. The comparison won’t go away — it’s just too tempting, because most people don’t deal with any other kind of budget. The point about how when a family pays its bills and keeps on top of things _it still owes a buttload of money_ and no one freaks out about that is IMHO much more likely to do some political good.
catclub
@Schlemizel: Mondale or HHH?
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: ITYM “Keeping Us Safe.” You don’t believe in keeping us safe? For shame, sir or ma’am, for shame. :P
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Heh. Yeah, I know. Another case of “theologically unacceptable to talk about it…”
But it’s stunning to look back at the previous decade and realize that, regardless of the motivations or values behind the war, the U.S. military just spent eight years blundering around in Iraq and the best solution it could come up with in all that time was “let’s pay our enemies not to shoot us.” I guess I can see why wingnuts believe government must be inefficient, when you look at what their favorite department’s turned into.
Walker
@Zifnab:
It is much worse than staffing the control tower. If it were just the control tower, we have already taken steps to take care of that. There are lots of options there.
No, what most people do not realize is that hidden away in the closure announcements is the announcement that, a few months after the towers close, the FAA is also going to shutdown all the IRL equipment at the airport. So the only instrument landings will be with GPS which has a very high ceiling.
Here in upstate NY, that will kill our airport.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
Exactly. Even the people who use the metaphor aren’t using it correctly, because people go into debt all the time to pay for things that they need but don’t have the cash on hand to buy. It’s a dishonest metaphor because it doesn’t describe actual human behavior.
Another factor is that there’s this weird conviction by conservatives that you can always do more with less money because magic. They really are convinced that you can run a country of 300 million people on the same budget you used for 250 million people because shut up, that’s why.
Chris
@ericblair:
It also helps that doctors and engineers (I don’t know about pilots) are generally quite well paid. Which lends itself to the wingnut “well, *I* work hard, I deserve a high pay, those other people who didn’t go to medical school are clearly stupid or lazy and deserve a shitty wage,” along with a general obliviousness to the living conditions of those of us who aren’t at that income level.
jibeaux
@MomSense: That too. The example I always think of is, yes, a family can probably eat more peanut butter and drive less and save some money without having an impact that reverberates worldwide. Austerity programs imposed on a budget the size of the United States government, of course, are a little different. I’m no expert, but this may be why microeconomics and macroeconomics were divided up like that.
ricky
@ChrisB: @ericblair:
Perhaps the pilot in question did not get the memo from his shop steward explaining that the union blames Congress, not the President.
Perhaps he is not an ignorant wingnut, but a legitimately
aggrieved member of Teh Base upset at Obummer’s dysmal negotiating skills.
Maybe he is a vet whose anger would have been managed by meds were it not for the backlog in VA claims that preceded the sequester.
Obama is the f’in Prexydint. Of course its his fault.
Hill Dweller
@ChrisB:
Bring on the meteor.
As an aside, the WH press pool said some people in Texas were protesting Obama, but they misspelled “Benghazi” on their signs.
Hill Dweller
@ricky:
I will ask you what I’ve asked numerous people: What would have happened if Obama let the Republicans default on the debt?
ETA: If my snark detector is malfunctioning, apologies.
Mnemosyne
@jibeaux:
You know what else a family can do? One of its members can get a part-time job, hence increasing the amount of revenue. You know, kind of like raising taxes.
Tim F.
@ricky: Nice to see you back, ricky! What happened to the salutation?
cheers,
TF
ericblair
@Mnemosyne:
You can toss “run government like a business” in there too. This is the United States: anything that can be run like a business has been outsourced to business already and then some. We’re well past the point where the government is only running things that can’t be run like a business, like those things that have serious market failures (like health insurance) or things that should have no profit motive (like meat inspections).
I’d rather not have the police department run like a profit-seeking business, although half an hour in traffic court can show you that it sure can be.
ricky
@Hill Dweller:
You must get your snark detector fixed lest it violate DHS rules aimed at preventing blog commenters from exploding
in anger. But don’t hurry. One of the two DHS inspectors
assigned to monitor your snark detection plan has been laid off due to the sequester.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
They want to go back to a government that serves fewer than 250 million people by making sure that it doesn’t do anything for Those People. They just use dog whistles instead of coming right out and saying it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
Absolutely not true. Like the disgusting arrogance and stupidity of attacking Iraq in the first place, this is not the military’s fault – it is ENTIRELY Bush and Cheney’s. The military had plans to start rebuilding infrastructure on day one so the country wouldn’t be plunged into turmoil for eight years and hate us. They were told to throw those plans away, because real men wing it and everything would be great anyway.
Tim F.
@Hill Dweller: No need to apologize, you took the bait just as intended. Ricky is one of the more talented trolls on these here internets. I mean that sincerely. More class and better informed than your average run and polite as well, or at least he used to be. Although he won’t admit it ricky was my very first troll back when I started comment jousting on the Atlantic boards in 2000. He could get Stirling Newberry, one of the smarter people ever born, tied up in knots.
Console
@Chris:
The aviation field is pretty bad with it. I’m a controller in a red part of the country so I get the joy of working with unionized government employees that still like the GOP. Trying to point out the fact that they, as people that earn way more than the average government employee, will be the first on the chopping block in any spending cut mania is like talking to a brick wall. They simply can’t square the idea that having a skill and a job doesn’t magically mean they will be saved.
catclub
@ericblair: “anything that can be run like a business has been outsourced to business already”
Not quite true! I am a very happy participant in the TSP program. MUCH better (approximately zero extraneous fees) than a business run 401(k). Also, national park rangers, still public employees.
Mike in NC
@Chris: Airline pilots used to be well paid by middle class standards, but deregulation and mergers screwed most of them big time, and many had to sign away pensions just to keep their jobs.
ricky
@Frankensteinbeck:
The choice of Cheney was entirely Bush’s fault.
The choice of Bush was Rove’s fault. And five member’s of the Supreme Court (aided and abedded by a couple of thousand Naderites in New Hampshire, give or take, whose acts of enablement resulted from Gore’s negligence in cleary demonstrating a reason to vote for him.)
mellowjohn
@FlipYrWhig: hmmmm…. now what possibly could have happened 32 years ago to get people to think that? i wonder what it could be……
Maude
@Hill Dweller:
#32
Oh, thank you. You have brightened my day.
Petorado
Democrats really need to call all Republican efforts to cut spending what it really is — a cut in services. Republicans aren’t about saving money (which is what they are implying by using the term “spending cuts”), they wants to isolate people from common services, which the government can provide at a greater economy of scale and without the additional expense of profit motive.
The situation with the FAA is just what Republicans ordered: it’s a cut in basic human services.
bk
As a Cardinals fan, a little part of me dies every time that image pops up.
MomSense
@FlipYrWhig:
I wish it were used in that way but it is always the family sitting around the kitchen table deciding to tighten their belts.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
I think it is all just a smokescreen. They say these things only when they are out of power (Chaney’s deficits don’t matter is forgotten) and because the real agenda is to get rid of Medicare, Social Security, etc.
Patrick
@ChrisB:
Did they say which airline this pilot works for? It is scary that pilots that are that misinformed about one area is also responsible for people’s lives. I would prefer to stay away from that airline.
Misterpuff
@ericblair: Plus they work in industries that are federally regulated (Medicare/HHS and FAA)so that when some initiative is limited by the regs, they feel the pinch, and everyone knows the Dems are the reg crazy….
Keith G
This seems to be the fight that the Obama administration wanted. Now that it’s full on, I hope they can accomplish what they thought they could. I am beginning to have a few doubts.
Sasha
That’s the problem with the Modern Right: They want Santa to give them free stuff. ;)
askew
@Schlemizel:
She’s actually in Mark Dayton’s old seat. Franken is in Wellstone’s seat. Both of them are big disappointments. They always vote the right way, but they don’t lead on anything. Both are following the Hillary Clinton model of leading on nothing and just biding your time in the Senate. I prefer Senators like Gillibrand, Obama, etc. who have come right into the Senate and started leading on important issues.
weaselone
@Console:
Were they asleep during the Reagan Presidency?
Another Halocene Human
@Chris: I’d love to see them shut down that boondoggle military plane purchase in favor of subsidizing the FAA. Strange nobody suggesting they do THAT.
MattR
I can’t say I support any of these legislative efforts to ameliorate the effects fo the sequester. The sequester was supposed to hurt. The only way it will have its intended effect is if it continues to hurt. It won’t work if every single time one of the cuts is overly painful, we restore the money or divert it from somewhere else. If that happens, there will never be a need for a “grand bargain” so we will just end up with the reduced federal government that Republicans desire.
The Sailor
@Mike in NC: Middle aged major airline pilots make around $250k a year. They just fucked all the younger pilots to do it. And the folks who do their maintenance.
It’s like the music industry, if you’re not at the top, you don’t make shit.
Not Sure
@Villago Delenda Est: And yet, if you screamed this on the plane loud enough for the pilot to hear, your ass would be in a sling.
AndoChronic
They, the wealthy, rather cut field and aircraft maintenance so as long as their already jacked-up plane might land and take-off on their, holier than thou, prick-ass “schedule”. Fuck ’em and let them burn!