Matt Kibbe Responds to the President’s Sequester Savings Smears

Washington, DC- FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe issued the following response to President Obama’s State of the Union attacks on the promised sequester savings:

“Congress doesn’t have a sequestration problem; they have a sequestration promise to keep to the American people, one that the President supported on the campaign trail before he was against it. And frankly, it’s the bare minimum effort that Congress and President Obama can make, considering they have failed to pass a budget in over 4 years.”

“Tonight the President described the savings as ‘sudden and harsh,’ an odd choice of words since the savings have been a contingency plan for over a year in the event that Congress and the White House failed to find spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling- which they did fail to do.”  

“The use of words like ‘sudden’ and ‘harsh’ in the President’s speech are deliberate attempts to scare Americans into blindly agreeing to the President’s agenda to increase spending and expand the size and power of the federal government.”

“The sequester savings are not cuts in the same sense that you and I think about ‘spending cuts’ in our own household budgets. Imagine calling up your credit card company and saying, ‘I know I can’t pay my bill this year, but my debt is going to be $500 next month rather than the $800 I had originally expected.’”

“That is the sequester in a nutshell, only on an exponentially larger scale. There is a baseline of federal spending that increases automatically every year, and the sequester savings mean that the increase in total spending is going to go up less, rather than actually lowering.”

“Squabbling over $1.2 trillion in anticipated spending ‘reductions’ over ten years seems pretty silly when considering that the fiscal deficit was $1.3 trillion for 2012 alone. President Obama and Congressional leadership have to stop tinkering at the margins, return to regular order and pass a budget as required by law.”

“In layman’s terms, Mr. President, we citizens call this ‘doing your job.’”