While watching his fellow Yankees, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit homeruns, the incomparable Yogi Berra uttered the famous phrase: “It’s déjà vu all over again!”
In the now infamous and so-called Y2K “crisis” before the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2000, there were dire warnings for months in advance about mass computer and system shut-downs and countless disruptions of services all over the world. It did not happen.
Never before has an American president played the American people for fools such as Barack Obama has done this year with his apocalyptic warnings about what is going to happen tomorrow when the paltry “sequestration” spending cuts hit the federal government; a cut of little over 2% ($44 billion in actual outlays) out of a gargantuan fiscal year budget of over $3.5 trillion.
The following are a few of the consequences, according to Obama and his liberal acolytes, that will occur if the scheduled cuts resulting from Obama’s own sequestration scheme -- which he and his new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hatched during the summer of 2011 -- go through tomorrow:
- 90-minute flight delays and lay-offs of air traffic controllers according to Obama’s Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood; interestingly enough, a recent study showed that there is a surplus of thousands of controllers.
- Border patrol agents will be laid-off according to Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. Her department has already recklessly released over 500 illegal immigrants from jail even before tomorrow’s “sequestration” cuts go into effect and her department agency threatens to release thousands more.
- Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he will have to cut Title I money for poor children.
- Thousands of government workers will be furloughed; Senator Rand Paul said this week federal workers’ salaries/benefits should be cut by 20% to equalize them with private sector workers.
The sob stories from Obama’s cabinet secretaries go on and on; all of them are emulating their maudlin boss. Republicans scoff at all of the dire warnings by the president and his cabinet officers and say that Obama -- who is in the 5th year of his non-stop White House political campaign -- is highlighting worse case cuts which don’t have to happen for his maximum political gain. On Tuesday, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the United States House of Representatives, Congressman Bob Goodlatte from Virginia, said that the Obama administration’s releasing illegal immigrants is “abhorrent.”
Congressman Goodlatte said that the Obama administration's politically-motivated decision to release hundreds of illegal aliens is also dangerous: “It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration. By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives. It also undermines our efforts to come together with the administration and reform our nation’s immigration laws. Unfortunately, this administration has a poor record of enforcing our immigration laws and has routinely sought to undermine them.”
Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Al, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that “The administration has further demonstrated that it has no commitment to enforcing the law and cannot be trusted to deliver on any future promises of enforcement,” touching upon the next major battle in Congress, immigration reform.
Obama and his party leaders in the Senate, want the Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass a bill to prevent the automatic cuts amounting to $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. Republicans point out that they have already passed two budgets bills within the past year which do not increase taxes on the American people. On the other hand, the Senate, controlled by the Democrats, has not passed a legally-required annual budget for the past four years.
The president -- instead of playing countless rounds of golf with Tiger Woods and his other friends; taking separate vacations from his wife and making endless political speeches around the country since his inauguration -- should have been meeting with congressional leaders to find ways to prioritize the mandatory sequestration cuts without raising taxes. Instead, Obama has been jetting around America on Air Force One issuing Cassandra-like warnings of what will happen if his sequestration cuts occur.
As in the Y2K “crisis” at the beginning of this millennium, Americans will find out that the world will not end tomorrow.
