That's the American way. Other countries seem to do really well without a permanently hungry defense industry and war to feed it. But not the US.
A steep slowdown in defense spending tied to the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undercutting the country’s economic recovery, new government data released Friday revealed.
The report showed gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent during the first three months of the year — significantly slower than most economists had expected. The culprit? A surprising 11.5 percent annualized drop-off in military spending.
The decline comes on the heels of an even bigger plunge in defense spending at the end of last year that brought economic growth to a standstill. Taken together, the two quarters represent the steepest declines in military outlays since the Korean War, according to JPMorgan Chase economist Michael Feroli. ...WaPo
Just the impact of the Republicans' enforced "sequester" alone is already setting the GDP back "for years to come."
Rock. Hard place. And they added "austerity" to situation...
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Ruth Marcus, also in the Washington Post, checks out who gets hurt and who doesn't after the freak-out about travel delays.
When the so-called sequester was triggered, the Obama administration was accused of exaggerating its impact. This week wasn’t sky-is-falling rhetoric, it was the-skies-aren’t-moving reality.
So it’s no wonder that Congress responded to the mess by, as The Post put it in a magnificently Latinate phrase, circumventing sequestration. When constituents howl, Washington listens — at least when the constituents are well-connected.
You might point out, and you’d be right, that lawmakers have not been nearly as responsive to other victims of the sequester’s mindlessness: kids who lost Head Start slots, criminal defendants whose public defenders have been furloughed, unemployed workers with benefits curtailed, Indian reservations unable to hire teachers.
Other sequester cuts take a silent, uncertain toll. The Food and Drug Administration will have to cut food inspections by nearly one-fifth, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told USA Today. If we luck out, we will never know the impact. Officials at the National Institutes of Health warn of budding scientists lured to other careers, or other countries, because of the uncertainty and difficulty of securing federal grants. ...WaPo
It comes down to deciding who to blame.
The only real division between Republican and Democratic lawmakers concerned which direction to point the finger: whether the air-traffic controller crisis was the unavoidable result of allowing the sequester to take effect (Democrats) or it was manufactured by the administration and Democrats looking to maximize the sequester’s pain (Republicans). ...WaPo
For most Americans, the "sequester" is a Republican-driven punishment. It looks as ridiculous and disturbing as the Spanish "penitentes" flailing themselves and drawing real blood during Easter parades in Sevilla. The economic disasters in America are, however, the work of a single, crazy and obscene political group on the right and it's our blood they're drawing, not their own.
