Is sequester inevitable? Avoidable ?

"Sequestration "  ahead  why Obama is not in Washington D.C. ? The Answer  is here.

Just a little of the two weeks left Is sequester inevitable? Avoidable ? In nine days, $85 billion of automatic spending cuts will snap down on the federal budget. Half of the cuts will hit defense; half will hit Medicare spending. We’ve been expecting this since the summer of 2011. We were supposed to deal with it in December—remember the words fiscal cliff?—but most of Congress punted the cuts to March 1. It’s the latest in the ongoing series of manufactured crises that have made Congress our most beloved institution.What’s more fun than a manufactured crisis? Why, a manufactured political spat about that crisis! Seven weeks have passed since the deadline was bumped to March, and in that time the Republican Party has alternated between attacking the White House for pushing sequestration and infighting over whether the cuts should proceed as they are. It’s confusing I sure hope so. President Obama's own words might haunt him. It started with Mitt Romney, a once-influential Republican Party politician and its 2012 nominee for president. In the third debate with President Obama, Romney fretted that “a trillion dollars in cuts through sequestration and budget cuts to the military” would weaken America’s defenses. The president literally dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “The sequester is not something that I proposed,” he said. “It's something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”* The President is always looking to point the finger at someone else, which almost always comes right back at him! “My message to [Congress] is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.” (President Obama, Super Committee Statement, November 21, 2011) Democrats are using scare tactics and hyped rhetoric in making their case against sequestration. It seems as though any cut in government spending will lead to some sort of catastrophic occurrence.During his speech ,Barack Obama threatened the loss of thousands of jobs. 

- “It will jeopardize our military readiness”

- “It will eviscerate job-creating investments in education, energy and medical research”

- “Emergency responders, their ability to respond to and recover from disaster bill be degraded”

- “Border patrol agents will see their hours reduced”

- “FBI agents will be furloughed”

- “Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go”

- “Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays in airports across the country”

- “Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off”

- “Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids”

- “Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to preventive care and primary care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings”

- “The unemployment rate might tick up again”

- “Deeper cuts in student loan programs”

Everybody with half a brain saw this coming. These scare tactics are old. The same thing over and over. It's a shame that he ( Obama) signed on Sequester Bill last year . And now the inevitable is going happen anyhow.We all know that he doesn't want to cut anything. All the things that he scared us with in the beginning of his first term didn't work.Republican House Speaker John Boehner has responded to President Obama's apocalyptic speech on sequestration yesterday. In the Wall Street Journal, Boehner writes the following: Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it. Unfortunately, he has put forth no detailed plan that can pass Congress, and the Senate—controlled by his Democratic allies—hasn't even voted on a solution, let alone passed one. By contrast, House Republicans have twice passed plans to replace the sequester with common-sense cuts and reforms that protect national security. Boehner's office contests that characterization, arguing that the PowerPoint was simply Boehner’s attempt to explain the president's plan to the Republican caucus.  The Obama-Boehner grand bargain that was negotiated in the summer of 2011 and came so close to being agreed upon increasingly looks like the best bet conservatives could get. It was the "sequester" . #  The hypocrisy runs deep.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

* In August 2011, with the nation's debt-limit deadline fast approaching, and with the threat of credit downgrades and government shutdowns looming over partisan negotiations in Washington, congressional Republicans refused to up the federal debt ceiling without accompanying spending cuts to shrink the deficit.

When talks broke down, sides agreed on the Budget Control Act -- a measure that applied discretionary spending caps and also included a mandate for more deficit-reduction in the future. It created the congressional budget "supercommittee" -- the panel of representatives and senators that were given another deadline to propose a package of spending cuts and/or tax hikes to lower the deficit.

Sequestration was agreed upon as the unpleasant consequence of failure: If the committee couldn't recommend a package by late 2011, and if Congress couldn't pass it in January 2012, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts would be triggered.

# The Budget Control Act of 2011 (Pub.L. 112–25, S. 365, 125 Stat. 240, enacted August 2, 2011) is a federal statutein the United States that was signed into law by President Barack Obama on August 2, 2011. The Act brought conclusion to the 2011 United States debt-ceiling crisis, which had threatened to lead the United States into sovereign default on or about August 3, 2011.

The law involves the introduction of several complex mechanisms, such as creation of the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (sometimes called the "super committee"),^[1] options for a balanced budget amendmentand automatic budget sequestration.