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As Hurricane Sandy approaches the northeast United States, the left is attempting to politicize the storm, attacking Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), for wanting to shift more responsibility for disaster relief from the federal government to the states.
They ignore the fact that President Barack Obama's proposal for the upcoming budget sequester would cut nearly $900 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including disaster relief, food and shelter, and flood management at both the federal and state levels.
The cuts, detailed on pages 94 through 96 of the White House's sequestration proposal, released in mid-September, show how far the Obama administration has been willing to go in order to preserve the idea of tax hikes on "millionaires and billionaires" rather than reaching a comprehensive grand bargain on deficit reduction that does not place additional burdens on the economy or essential services.
Obama's proposed cuts to FEMA include the following (emphasis added):
Flood Hazard Mapping and Risk Analysis Program - $8 million
State and Local Emergency Programs (non-defense) - $183 million
State and Local Emergency Programs (defense) - $5 million
United States Fire Administration and Training - $4 million
Salaries and Expenses (non-defense) - $75 million
Salaries and Expenses (defense) - $7 million
Disaster Relief - $580 million
Emergency Food and Shelter - $10 million
Radiological Emergency Preparedness Program - $3 million
National Pre-disaster Mitigation Fund - $3 million
These cuts likely underestimate the total cuts proposed to disaster relief functions, since the U.S. armed forces--subject to separate cuts in Obama's sequester proposals--frequently provide support to FEMA operations, as well as essential search and rescue services.
The White House sequestration proposal also warns: "The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to respond to incidents of terrorism and other catastrophic events would be undermined."
While Romney and Ryan are merely proposing to shift some of the emergency functions to the states, or to balance further increases in FEMA funding with offsetting cuts in other discretionary spending, Obama has proposed actual cuts, at both the federal and state levels.
Originally posted by MrInquisitive
reply to post by jibeho
Uh..... the sequester is a massive budget cut, so all parts of the budget will have to be cut, this includes disaster relief. There's no way around it unless you want to cut other things, such as defense, even more. The budget sequester option was arrived at by bipartisan agreement. The GOP and Romney wants to gut the FEMA budget in general, i.e. even without the drastic budget sequestering, which is not what Obama or the Democrats want. In other words, you are comparing apples and oranges. The cuts you show for Obama are for the drastically cut sequester budget. Romney's budget proposals are for just a regular, i.e. no sequester, budget. To make Obama appear to be the bad guy in this case is just more typical right-wing prevarication and conflation. But then you folks wouldn't have much to rant about if you didn't continue with these tired, tendentious tactics that twist the facts.
edit on 30-10-2012 by MrInquisitive because: (no reason given)
The goal outlined in the Budget Control Act of 2011 was to cut at least $1.5 trillion over the coming 10 years, (avoiding much larger "sequestration" across-the-board cuts which would be equal to the debt ceiling increase of $1.2 trillion incurred by Congress through a failure to produce a deficit reduction bill), therefore bypassing Congressional debate and resulting in a passed bill by December 23, 2011.[3] On November 21, the committee concluded its work, issuing a statement that began with the following: "After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline."
Originally posted by Plotus
Originally posted by MrInquisitive
reply to post by jibeho
Uh..... the sequester is a massive budget cut, so all parts of the budget will have to be cut, this includes disaster relief. There's no way around it unless you want to cut other things, such as defense, even more. The budget sequester option was arrived at by bipartisan agreement. The GOP and Romney wants to gut the FEMA budget in general, i.e. even without the drastic budget sequestering, which is not what Obama or the Democrats want. In other words, you are comparing apples and oranges. The cuts you show for Obama are for the drastically cut sequester budget. Romney's budget proposals are for just a regular, i.e. no sequester, budget. To make Obama appear to be the bad guy in this case is just more typical right-wing prevarication and conflation. But then you folks wouldn't have much to rant about if you didn't continue with these tired, tendentious tactics that twist the facts.
edit on 30-10-2012 by MrInquisitive because: (no reason given)
EXACTLY....... you got it. Also, Fema [sic] is just not monetarily sustainable. Simply printing money only makes it all the more expensive. There are too many programs taking presidence [sic] and the money only spreads so far....
"While both parties are culpable for sequestration because the Budget Control Act passed Congress, the president proposed it originally and ultimately owns its outcome," said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the Romney campaign. "That is because he alone can lead by calling the party leaders together for a resolution today if he wanted as president."
Obama said that the sequester -- and the defense cuts that would result from it -- was not his proposition. "It is something that Congress has proposed," he said in the debate.
But it was Obama’s negotiating team that came up with the idea for defense cuts in 2011, though they were intended to prod Congress to come up with a better deal for reining in the deficit, not as an effort to make those cuts reality.
Meanwhile, members of both parties in Congress voted for the legislation that set up the possibility of sequestration. Obama’s position is that Congress should now act to avoid those across-the-board cuts.
Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his, but he did need cooperation from Congress to get to this point. We rate the statement Mostly False.