CD015: Who Caused Sequester?

Congressional Dish

Jennifer Briney

News, Congress, Government, Politics, Corporations

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2013

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

House Republicans tried hard during their week off to label the huge March 1 cuts as "the President's sequester", but was President Obama really the cause? We go back to August 1, 2011, the day sequester was born, to see who was celebrating the cuts and how they passed the House. August 1, 2011: The House of Representatives passed the . The Budget Control Act: Raised the debt ceiling for 18 months, allowing the United States to pay its bills until the fiscal cliff crisis in January 2013. Mandated a vote on the Tea Party's Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Enacted spending caps until 2021 designed to reduce the debt by $1.2 trillion. Stopped graduate students from getting student loans from the government. Created the SuperCommittee tasked with agreeing on $1.2 trillion of additional government cuts. Created across-the-board, percentage based cuts - 50% to discretionary spending and 50% to defense spending- to take a effect if the SuperCommittee failed. This is "sequester". So far, we know that if if the sequester goes into effect on March 1... Air traffic controller offices will be closed across the country. Defense Department will s. Active duty members are protected from cuts. , not by law but by choice. Unemployed people can expect a people will lose their jobs. People mentioned in the podcast: @BillTaylor2: Came up with "sequester finger-pointing week". Funny Boston dude. : A conversational, educational, and funny podcast I just discovered and enjoy. Give 'em a try. New episode next week! Congress comes back from vacation. Will they stop the sequester?

Transcript

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0:00.0	and Hello friends this is Jen Briney and welcome to the 15th episode of Congressional dish or should I say the second recording of the 15th episode of Congressional dish because I've already done this entire episode and it got deleted when my program crashed and I'm an idiot
0:34.8	because I didn't save it so that'll teach you kids save your work so now that
0:40.9	we've got that little life lesson out of the way, this episode is going to be about the Budget Control Act.
0:46.6	Now, this week there was nothing going on in Congress because Congress was on vacation.
0:51.0	And the reason that they were on vacation is I guess
0:53.6	President's Day even though the President was at work Congress wasn't and the
1:00.7	reason that we have to care about that is that there is something big happening next Friday, March 1st, and that is something called sequester.
1:07.5	Now that's probably a word that you've heard about.
1:10.0	If you're listening to this show, probably care about it but the vast majority of
1:14.6	Americans have no idea what that is and you know I can't really blame them because
1:20.2	this week there was a man with no legs in South Africa who had ran in the
1:27.0	Olympics who murdered his girlfriend through a door said he didn't know she was in there. I mean it's the weirdest story so I mean
1:35.2	what would you rather focus on the sequester or the guy with no legs that killed his
1:39.0	girlfriend? I mean it's fascinating. I know I can't stop reading the news about it. But this sequester thing is going to affect your life so much more than the legless man. So that's what this show is going to focus on and we're going to go back to the beginning. I've actually I've run it through a couple
1:54.5	times in some previous episodes giving you the short story of where the
1:57.4	sequester came from but today we're going to look at the entire story and I'm
2:01.1	going to give you highlights of the debate that happened
2:03.3	on the day that the sequester was born now the sequester was born out of the
2:06.7	Budget Control Act and if you were to listen to the Republicans this week on
2:12.1	Twitter you would definitely think that this whole thing was caused by President Obama.
2:17.0	Now as my friend and Twitter follower and listener, Bill Taylor, whose handle is at Bill Taylor too if you want to
2:25.3	follow him he called the sequester finger pointing week and the reason is there was a
	...

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