Flying the Government Skies

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in "Flight Delays as Political Strategy," but the story gets worse the closer we look.

Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can't deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

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Austerity Is Not to Blame for Tepid Job Growth

Politics: Democrats were quick to blame the anemic March jobs number on the "sequester" spending cuts. If that were the case, what explains the previous four years of lousy job growth under Obama?

At 88,000, the jobs growth in March was well below expectations. And while the unemployment rate dropped, that was the result of hundreds of thousands dropping out of the labor force who as a result aren't counted as unemployed.

Democrats, of course, tried to pin the blame for this on Republicans for allegedly pushing austerity measures.

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Email tells feds to make sequester as painful as promised

The White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling tours of the president’s home for the foreseeable future as the sequester spending cuts begin to bite and the administration makes good on its warnings of painful decisions.

Announcement of the decision — made in an email from the White House Visitors Office — came hours after The Washington Times reported on another administration email that seemed to show at least one agency has been instructed to make sure the cuts are as painful as President Obama promised they would be.

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The Sequester Revelation

And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation's ability to forecast severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornados, was seriously undermined. Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.

Or so President Obama and his Cabinet prophets have been preaching ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday. The bit about the weather is a real quote from the White House budget director.

But if any of these cataclysms do come to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation. The truth is that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17% on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.

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Gov’t Office Warns Sequester Will Hurt Agency…That Doesn’t Exist Anymore

Of all the “horrors” the March 1 sequester will inflict on our nation, perhaps the most terrifying are the cuts it will force on the National Drug Intelligence Center, a non-existent government program.

Yeah, let us explain.

 

Acting in compliance with The Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, as Reason’s Mike Riggs notes, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in September 2012 delivered a report to Congress detailing the effects of the automatic spending cuts.

 

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