As damaging sequester continues, Congress goes on 5-week vacation
You may not have noticed, but the entire United States Congress sleazed out of town at the beginning of August for a five-week vacation, leaving much of the economy in a shambles.
Let's take stock. The economy grew in the second quarter at a pitiful annual rate of 1.7%. The average workweek for all private nonfarm employees decreased last month from the month before, as did their average hourly earnings. Job growth has been middling at best.
What has been Washington's remedy for an economy that plainly needs another shot of fiscal stimulus? The automated austerity regime known as the sequester, a package of budget cuts cynically designed to fall heaviest on our most vulnerable communities — the penniless, the disabled, the homeless and the very young. True, the sequester caused an early crisis in air travel, when it seemed that enforced furloughs of air traffic controllers would bollix up flight schedules. Congress remedied that provision, but quick.
Almost everyone in Congress and the White House agrees that the sequester, which was crafted to end the 2011 debit-limit standoff, is pure insanity. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) recently acknowledged on Fox News that the sequester was "not the best way to go about spending reductions." It was put in place, he said, "because Congress couldn't do the job it was supposed to a couple of years ago." In a recent interview, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called his support of the sequester "the worst vote I have cast in many years."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20130811,0,2015313.column