Sequester Talks Have No Sign Of Progress, Obama Wants Higher Taxes

Sequester talks are apparently failing, with no sign of progress coming from the US Congress. President Obama wants higher taxes and is busy trying to incite a public outcry by warning of potential effects to the average American, but no one seems to care.

On March 1 about $85 billion in automatic spending cuts will hit both the Pentagon’s defense budget and domestic programs, which includes roughly $11 billion in cuts coming from Medicare. As a comparison, these spending cuts are a tiny 2.4 percent of the $3.6 trillion worth federal spending that comes out of $15.7 trillion generated by the American economy.

According to the Washington Post, President Obama told a gathering of the nation’s governors at the White House that the sequester should be avoided:

“Congress is poised to allow a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts to kick in that will slow our economy, eliminate good jobs and leave a lot of folks who are already pretty thinly stretched scrambling to figure out what to do. These cuts do not have to happen. Congress can turn them off anytime with just a little bit of compromise.”

Instead of allowing the sequester to trigger, President Obama wants Congress to come up with a plan that has a combination of spending cuts and higher taxes. Republicans refuse to budget on this issue and instead are drafting bills that allow Obama greater liberty in how the spending cuts will be proportioned. This means that if Obama does not want cuts to a specific area of government, then it won’t happen, but some people say that Obama already has that ability as the Executive branch of government.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told reporters at a Republican Governors Association news conference that Obama is “trying to scare the American people” in order to generate a public outcry against the sequester. Rush Limbaugh felt the heat when Limbaugh said he was ashamed of the United States people. Some people are even questioning whether the debt crisis is even real or manufactured by politicians.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this month shows why the sequester is likely to be ignored by the public. The Washington Post explains the overall picture:

“While there is widespread support for trimming federal spending, when it comes to the specifics of what should be cut, clarity disappears. In not one of the 19 (!) specific areas did a majority of the sample express support for a diminishing of federal spending. (The closest was the 48 percent who favored cutting ‘aid to the world’s needy.’ So, that happened.) Somewhat amazingly, of the 19 areas Pew asked people about cutting, Americans favored increasing spending over decreasing spending in 16 of them.”

If there is a public outcry related to the sequester and the debt crisis, what do you think it should be targeting?