Sequester sets in

Unless you're totally avoiding the news, you know that spending cuts kick in today that I imagine will eventually impact me in some way, though I'm not sure how or when. Congress and the White House kicked the can down the road at the end of January with some tax increases and some spending cuts, but not enough of either. The GOP stated "that's it!" for tax increases though, so when Obama and the Democrats started looking for tax increases along with spending cuts to avoid these cuts, the republicans said no. The media has many several mentions of a "period of austerity" for our country that is looming. There doesn't seem to be a simple way around it, so I have to agree. If you owe a bunch of money, you either have to raise income or cut spending to pay it back. Do we need to pay it all back? No, but we do need to run at a surplus budget for a while if we're going to make a dent. So how do you do that?

Well, letting someone else play world cop for a bit would help. Wars are REALLY expensive....like CRAZY expensive and are a big chunk of the reason we have this tremendous debt to begin with, not to mention the thousands of lives we lost. We need to work smarter on that front.

Taxes need to increase in the short term. Not that it balances the budget, but why was the SSN tax ever reduced from 6% to 4% in the first place? Just a short term stimulus plan that was just that, short sighted.

Tax international companies for doing business here and have US corps creating jobs abroad bring back those jobs to the US. In the end, these two are the single most important things we can do for the long term health of our economy. Bring home jobs and employ people. A lot of problems go away if people have jobs and are paying into the system instead of living on the dole.

That's my political rant for the day! No baby yet and no indications that she's coming over the weekend or anything. Still prepping at the Sutton house!!