Rep. Bobby Scott makes several excellent points here.
1. You can’t cut $1.2 trillion out of the budget “in any intelligent kind of way,” as non-defense discretionary spending is already “at the lowest point we’ve been as a percentage of GDP since before Medicare…You can’t make $1.2 trillion in cuts make sense.”
2. “If you’re not going to have new revenues to help achieve a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction, then the mindless, painful, across-the-board sequester is about the only way to do it.” And the reason why we can’t get any revenue increases is, very simply, because of one party: Republicans. End of story.
3. The problem is that “people think that you can cut taxes and it doesn’t have any effect on the budget…well, if we had cut taxes a little less, we wouldn’t have to worry about the sequester, and that’s really what we’re paying for right now.”
4. If we try to fix the sequester, we might have to cut Social Security, which would be even “worse” than the sequester itself.
What a mess.
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