Shocker: President Obama's newest 'Grand Bargain', lands with a thud

[babylonsister]

23. Why do you let rethugs off the hook so readily? Very puzzling for a Dem site.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/03/04/the-sequester-is-a-republican-inflicted-wound/

The Sequester Is a Republican-Inflicted Wound
The origin of this mess is absolutely clear. It was created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the ransom Republican leaders received for agreeing to let the U.S. government pay its bills.
By Michael Grunwald @MikeGrunwaldMarch 04, 2013390 Comments


The sequester is here, with an initial $85 billion worth of haphazard and economically destructive spending cuts, a Washington wound almost universally described as “self-inflicted.” Let’s be clearer: It’s Republican-inflicted. It is a direct result of the insistence by GOP leaders in the summer of 2011 that they would not raise the federal debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to dramatic spending cuts. One can argue that the growth of the debt or the size of the government justified that insistence; I’d disagree. But it’s simply a fact that every budget crisis of the last two years—the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, the failure of the “supercommittee,” the fiscal cliff, and now this—stems from Republican debt-limit brinksmanship.

This is what makes all the Beltway back-and-forth about who came up with the sequester, and who moved which goalposts, and what Gene Sperling said to Bob Woodward, so annoying. The origin of this mess is absolutely clear. It was created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, the ransom Republican leaders received for agreeing to let the U.S. government pay its bills.

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