Did Obama 'move the goalposts' on sequester?
Republican leaders are complianing that President Obama agreed to creating mandatory sequester cuts without mandatory tax increases, so his call today for a balance of spending cuts and tax increases in order to stave off the sequester cuts before most of them kick in amounts to "moving the goalposts."
Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It’s true that John Boehner wouldn’t agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon — sequestration — is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous....Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo
Beutler quotes the act, key words in red:
Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction ...is enacted by January 15, 2012....discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced.
Ezra Klein points out:
The American people voted (in November) for the guy who wants to cut the deficit by increasing taxes. In fact, they went even further than that. They also voted for a Senate that would cut the deficit by increasing taxes. And then they voted for a House that would cut the deficit by increasing taxes, though due to the quirks of congressional districts, they didn’t get one.As for the idea that it's important that Obama proposed the sequester deal, Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast writes:
[The sequester] was the administration’s idea in much the way that it’s a parent’s “idea” to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House’s head, which was the possibility of the country going into default