By Katy Grimes

Sequestration is the word of the month. Prior to the federal government threatening Draconian cuts to food assistance programs and the Head Start program, most people had never heard of the word, which refers to the automatic cuts to federal spending that began on March 1.

Together with much of the media, the Obama administration’s sequestration warnings have been dire. “Devastating automatic cuts are taking effect if Congress doesn’t act, slashing vital services for children, seniors, the mentally ill, and our men and women in uniform,” the White House warned.

Actually, these sequestration cuts are merely cuts in increased government spending, not real budget cuts. According to a new report from the California Senate Office of Research, there are a number of programs exempted from sequester cuts, including:

* Child nutrition (school lunch program)
* Federal-aid highway programs
* Medicaid (Medi-Cal)
* Children’s Health Insurance Program (Healthy Families)
* Military salaries
* Pell grants
* Social Security benefits
* Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (CalFresh, formerly known as food stamps)
* Supplemental Security Income
* Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (CalWORKs)
* Veterans’ benefits and health care

Senate Office of Research

And nowhere in the Senate report does it address what the “cuts” really are — cuts of $44 billion in federal spending growth. Federal spending still will go up 1.4 percent next year, instead of 1.6 percent without sequestration. So there really is no overall cut.

“Many of the spending cuts Obama is calling for are actually revenue increases, like the $140 billion in ‘reduced payments to drug companies,’ which actually means the drug companies will be paying back rebates to the government,” the National Center for Policy Analysis found. “The plan includes similar savings in unemployment insurance and postal service reforms but a large portion of these savings comes from new fees.”

California warnings

The California state Senate report did not affirmatively define what will be cut. Instead, the Senate office reported lots of “coulds”:

By Katy Grimes

If you really want to cut through all of the media noise about the ‘”Fiscal Cliff,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-CA4, does this succinctly in a speech on Wednesday.

In a nutshell, McClintock explains: “In their blind pursuit of an ‘eat the rich’ ideology, Mr. Obama and his acolytes are imposing a policy that would utterly devastate hundreds of thousands of middle class families who depend on the jobs these small businesses provide. 

And for what? To wring enough money to fund Mr. Obama’s spending spree for a grand total of eight days. It’s telling that three-fourths of the new taxes he has proposed would be used to finance the new spending that he has also proposed.”

The following is the floor speech by McClintock, who once again schools Congress and the President on the reality of the fiscal cliff, where we are headed, who will really be hurt, and what needs to happen.

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. 
December 12, 2012

Mr. Speaker:

To understand the federal budget mess and the so-called fiscal cliff, it’s important to remember three numbers: 39, 37 and 64. 

Thirty nine percent is the combined increase of inflation and population over the last ten years. Thirty nine percent. 

Thirty seven percent is the increase in revenues during the same period. That’s despite the recession and tax cuts. Not quite keeping place, but pretty close.

Sixty four is what’s killing us. Sixty four percent is the increase in federal spending in that period. That’s nearly twice the rate of inflation and population over the last ten years. 

The spending side of the fiscal cliff is the so-called sequester: automatic cuts in federal spending. To hear some tell it, these cuts will mean the end of western civilization. 

Hardly. After a 64 percent increase in expenditures this decade, the sequester doesn’t actually cut spending at all: it simply limits spending growth next year to about a half a percent. 

I opposed the budget deal that created the sequester last year because it fell woefully short of what Standard and Poors clearly warned was necessary to preserve the nation’s triple-A credit rating. Sadly, that fear was born out. But now, the sequester is all we have. 

It’s true that defense takes the brunt of it, but does our defense spending today really need to be higher – inflation adjusted — than it was at the height of the Vietnam War, when we faced down the Soviet Union and had 500,000 combat troops in the field? 

The sequester isn’t stepping off a cliff – it’s taking one step back from the cliff. 

The tax increases, however, are a different matter. Without intervention, the federal tax burden will balloon 21 percent at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, taking somewhere between two and three thousand dollars from an average family. This summer, the House passed legislation to protect our nation from such a calamity, but Mr. Obama vowed to veto it and the Senate blocked it. 

Instead, Mr. Obama tells us that he will veto any plan that keeps taxes from going up on those very wealthy folks making over $200,000, who, he says, need to pay their fair share. 

(I suppose fairness is in the eye of the beholder. The top one percent earns 17 percent of all income but pays 37 percent of all income taxes. But that’s beside the point). 

The fine point of it is that a lot of those very wealthy folks making over $200,000 aren’t very wealthy and they aren’t even folks: they’re 1.3 million struggling small businesses filing under sub-chapter S. Our small businesses produce two-thirds of the new jobs in our economy. 

This battle IS very much FOR the middle class. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Mr. Obama’s tax increase on the so-called wealthy will actually throw some 200,000 middle and working class families into unemployment. Two hundred thousand. And that’s the optimistic estimate. An independent analysis by Ernst and Young puts that figure at closer to 700,000 lost jobs. 

That’s because the President’s taxes would slam 84 percent of net small business income – that’s precisely the income used to support and expand the labor force. 

In their blind pursuit of an “eat the rich” ideology, Mr. Obama and his acolytes are imposing a policy that would utterly devastate hundreds of thousands of middle class families who depend on the jobs these small businesses provide. 

And for what? To wring enough money to fund Mr. Obama’s spending spree for a grand total of eight days. It’s telling that three-fourths of the new taxes he has proposed would be used to finance the new spending that he has also proposed. 

Republicans don’t want to see taxes go up on anyone, period. We don’t want to see this government willfully throw hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work by this policy. 

The President obviously believes that in the 11th hour, Republicans will have no choice but ultimately to protect as many taxpayers as we possibly can, since the only alternative will be tax increases on everyone, including the job creators. He may be right. 

But that would mean a bleak and bitter new year for all those families who will watch helplessly as their jobs evaporate before their eyes. 

Let us pray the President has a change of heart before setting this calamity in motion.

Cross posted on the Flash Report

Katy Grimes: I’ve just returned home a trip across the country. And once again, I vowed to never take another cross-country flight.

I thank our government for this sorry state of affairs, because anyone who has traveled by air in the last decade, knows that the Transportation Security Administration is not about safety or security.

Nearly everyone I talk with has a TSA horror story. Face it–the Transportation Safety Administration is not exactly staffed with Harvard educated rocket scientists, or trained by Miss Manners.

While some TSA agents are friendly and professional, an overwhelming number are bullies with badges and bad attitude. I encountered one such team last week, while trying to leave Niceville, Florida.

Small airport syndrome

The Niceville airport is actually in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. It’s a small airport in a lovely area on the Gulf of Mexico. Flying in from Houston was rather uneventful, although when we arrived in the small plane, the ground crew announced that they were understaffed and passengers would have to wait for their bags.

Hmmm. Attitude problem number one.

Departing the Fort Walton Beach airport was another story. My husband and I had packed lightly and each had one small carry-on suitcase. As we were ushered up to the TSA podium, the female TSA agent made small talk, and then asked us to remove our toiletries.

She didn’t care about our computers–it was all about the tiny bottles of lotions.

Looking around, I noticed that even this tiny airport had one of the new full body scanners, inside of which you are forced to stand with your hands in the air like a criminal under arrest. Prior to standing inside of one of these airport scanners, I’ve never been forced to assume this position by someone wearing a badge. Imagine how the experience makes grandma feel.

“I’m looking for anything that’s liquid, sprayable or spreadable,” she announced. I assured her that all of our toiletries were in the TSA-authorized 3 ounce bottles. But that would not suffice. Apparently it’s not okay to speak to these people… it only confuses matters.

She quickly ushered us out of the line and to the conveyer belt where she began taking apart our bags. And as she did this, she pulled out my toiletry bag and announced loudly, “This isn’t a quart-sized bag; this is a gallon bag. All of your toiletries must fit into a quart-sized bag.”

Divide and conquer

She handed me over to another agent, who began stuffing my shampoo, hairspray, lotion, deodorant, toothpaste, and makeup into a quart-sized ziplock bag, which clearly wasn’t going to fit. As this was taking place, she pulled my husband over to another table, along with our two suitcases, and started rifling through his toiletry bag, all-the-while lecturing him with TSA babble.

The TSA agent I was handed off to asked me what I wanted to throw out. This is where things got sticky. I told him that instead of throwing my toiletries away, I would just check our bags instead of carrying them on the plane.

But that was too confusing. This TSA agent had a job to do, and by golly, he was going to get me to throw out my expensive shampoo and hairspray. I have a thing for nice shampoo, and would rather inconvenience myself at the baggage claim, than throw it away.

But my luggage was separated from my toiletries now, and my husband and I were separated. My poor husband was getting searched, removing clothing, and told to go through the scanner, while my TSA agent insisted that he needed to run my toiletries through the X-ray machine again. Who knows why since all he did was re-bag them.

After stepping out of the security area to go back to the airline to check the bags, at a cost of $50, we had to go through security one more time.

The final TSA bully was now manning the podium, apparently brought over by the dimbulb female TSA agent to deal with us. He noticed that our boarding passes already had the TSA clearance on them, and looked at me for explanation. “TSA wouldn’t allow me to board with my toiletries, so I just had to check our bags,” I explained.

“Well, at least you had a choice,” he sneered, glaring at me over the top of his reading glasses. “You’ve got an interesting definition of the word ‘choice,'” I said. “My ‘choice’ was to either throw out my toiletries or pay $50 to check my luggage. That’s not a ‘choice.'”

“And how is it that I made it across the country through two airports?” I asked him as I walked away. As I went through the stupid body scanner again, he stared at me.

But my husband wasn’t so lucky. The bully TSA agent took his sweet time checking my husband’s ID. He lingered over the boarding pass, writing several notes on it, checked and rechecked my husband’s ID, before he finally, slowly, handed everything back.  As my husband tried to take the boarding pass back, the bully TSA agent tightened his grip on the paper, staring  at my husband, like he was trying to start something. So my husband yanked the boarding pass out of the agent’s hands and walked away.

The bully TSA agent lowered his glasses and his pen. “Excuse me sir, come back here,”

As my husband turned around, he said, “This isn’t so much about you as it is about the system, my husband said. “This is a farce, and you know it.”

Fortunately, we didn’t end up in TSA jail. Airport security has become a no-rights zone.

The end

After four trips through the body scanner and baggage X-ray machine, we arrived at our gate to find that our flight had been cancelled.

TSA is a farce

We all know that the TSA is a farce run by boobs. But the real tragedy is that the TSA appears to nothing more than a conditioning process, preparing U.S. citizens for the loss of liberties that the government has planned for us as it expands into every area of our lives.

The farce of the ‘remove your laptop’ rule was easily proved by New York Times writer Matt Richtel’s in his story, “The mystery of the flying laptop.” As Richtel made inquiries about why laptops must be opened and placed in a separate TSA bin at the airport, the TSA would provide no answers. “I was starting to feel like a Monty Python character, riding a pretend horse, clomping my coconut halves together to simulate the sound of horse hooves. A comical quest for a mythical grail,” Richtel wrote. After months of inquiries, research and discussions with real security experts, Richtel never got an answer.

NYT writer Nick Bilton wrote about the “turn your devices off ” policy during takeoff and landing. “Surely if electronic gadgets could bring down an airplane, you can be sure that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, which has a consuming fear of 3.5 ounces of hand lotion and gel shoe inserts, wouldn’t allow passengers to board a plane with an iPad or Kindle, for fear that they would be used by terrorists,” Bilton wrote.

Bilton’s research found that the CTIA, the wireless industry association, said a study that it conducted more than a decade ago found no interference from mobile devices. The radio frequencies that are assigned for aviation use are separate from commercial use, the CTIA found. And, wiring and instruments for aircraft are shielded to protect them from interference from commercial wireless devices.

Another farce.

Yesterday, the headline read: “TSA Let 25 Illegal Aliens Attend Flight School Owned by Illegal Alien.”

I’m all for the push to disband the TSA. “Americans have spent nearly $60 billion, and they are no safer today than they were before 9/11,” Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) announced when releasing a Joint-Staff Majority report on the agency.

(Raw Justice has the Top 10 TSA horror stories – and the photo above is theirs)