Article snippet: Posted at 7:00 pm on August 6, 2017 by Josh Kimbrell The Budget Control Act of 2011, a.k.a “Sequestration” was an ill-conceived idea to try and force the 112th Congress into some sense of fiscal responsibility. The deficit in the early Obama years regularly topped $1 trillion per year, and after Republicans won the House in the 2010 midterms there was little agreement on how to control deficit spending. The Republican House and the Democrat Senate could not agree on spending reductions, and President Obama didn’t want any spending reductions at all. Barack Obama re­fused to ad­dress the deficit prob­lem so, in­stead, he made a deal with then-Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Leader Harry Reid and then- House Speaker John Boehner to try and eke-out some savings in the 33% of the Federal budget that is considered discretionary. The primary driver of the federal deficit, entitlement spending, was left unaffected by the sequester, but other social programs and defense spending is included in the discretionary budget. The Sequester mandated $1.2 trillion in meaningless spending “reductions” that never truly materialized. Instead of reducing actual spending levels, the sequester merely slowed the growth of overall spending and perpetuated a game of budgetary chicken. Fifty percent of the spending reductions were targeted at defense spending, though defense spending accounts for only sixteen percent of overall federal spending. By playing chicken with military funding, our Navy is se... Link to the full article to read more

Emotional score for this article