Did You Know...

**Written by Doug Powers

President Obama has been busy blaming Republicans for the sequester even though he insisted on the option being included in the bill he signed. It’s unlikely however that Republicans were the ones to insert the presidential pay exemption into the sequester rules:

President Barack Obama won’t have to worry about his paycheck if the spending sequestration included in the Budget Control Act that he signed into law in 2011 begins taking effect this Friday.

A report published last month by the Congressional Research Service — “Budget Sequestration and Selected Program Exemptions and Special Rules” — identifies certain programs that are exempt from sequestration and lays out special rules that govern the sequestration of others.

Section 255 of the Budget Control Act includes “Compensation for the President” as one of those exemptions (Page 19).

Flashback: “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game” — Barack Obama, January 2009.

In other sequestration news, President Obama is hitting the road to urge people to contact their members of Congress to help stop the looming impact of the bill he signed into law:

With just a few days left to convince Congress to avert the so-called sequester spending cuts, President Obama today travels to a part of the country where the cuts could hit the hardest: Virginia’s shipyards.

Mr. Obama is visiting Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries in Newport News, Virginia. If the sequester goes into effect, it could have a direct and clear impact on Virginia’s shipbuilding industry — the Navy would cancel the maintenance of 11 ships in Norfolk, according to the White House, and it would delay and defer other projects in the state. Furthermore, cuts that impact Newport News Shipbuilding could reverberate across the country, since the company has a supplier base in all 50 states.

The sequester will cut around $85 billion in federal spending this year and around $1.1 trillion more over the next 10 years. The White House said Mr. Obama’s trip today is an opportunity to highlight the “devastating impact” the sequester will have “if Congressional Republicans fail to compromise to avert the sequester by March 1st.”

As far as “big picture” stuff, via the Mercatus Center, here’s a graph showing federal spending for the next several years with and without the sequester — everybody panic:

(click to enlarge)

**Written by Doug Powers

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