Government Spending, Nasty Liberals

Obama Shot Down Governors’ Suggestions On Spending Cuts

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President Obama told America’s state governors that is was “time to govern” yesterday before telling the press to take a hike  so he could take questions. Now we know why he didn’t want cameras around for the Q&A session. According to some of the governors present all he did was shoot down their suggestions on spending cuts.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said the governors asked Obama to come up with better cuts, or even to delay future spending, like the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare, if the budget situation is as dire as the administration says. “The answer to everything we got was no,” Haley said.

As the governors spoke, there was a real question of how much flexibility the president has to shape the cuts that are contained in the sequestration measure, which he proposed and signed into law with bipartisan support in 2011. Does Obama have the authority to move money around so government consultants would take more of a hit than Head Start?

Jindal believes so. “Everybody has known that this was coming,” he said. “When did [Obama] go to his Cabinet heads and say, ‘If you had to make these reductions, what would be the least painful way to do it?’ ”

There’s no indication Obama has done anything to make the cuts easier on the public. To the contrary, it is in his political interest to make the cuts as painful as possible and then blame them on Republicans. (Read More)