Pentagon Readying 800,000 for Rolling Layoffs

The Wall Street Journal ^ | December 30, 2012 | DION NISSENBAUM And DAMIAN PALETTA

[TwelveOfTwenty]

We are in an odd situation where cutting spending can't even be talked about. Neither side wants to. Both have their sacred cows that they don't want to be made into burgers, and the biggest are Social Security, Medicare, and the Military.

Good point, but we also have a lot of extended unemployment going into disability going into welfare. We could cut that, but no one wants to for the same reason.

It would provide hours of crying single women who just got laid off of their EPA/DOD jobs saying they have no place to go, along with pictures of families living on the street because of unemployment cuts. How do you think that will play?

If your point is how will the left and the MSM use this against the GOP, the GOP could point out that most of those women had jobs before the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007...but that won't happen, so never mind.

Go outside of the echo chamber that is FR. Look at how people are viewing this, and how they will view the cliff.

I have, and I've seen the vacant office and retail space, the people sleeping in the street, blocks of houses boarded up, the gang violence, none of which was prevented by all of this money we borrowed and spent.

It's called making hard choices. Reagan made the tough choices. He cut spending, and things got worse before they got better. He took a lot of criticism for his budget cuts, but everyone was on board when things turned around, and he easily won re-election in 1984.

We're in this mess now because we didn't make the hard choices earlier, but instead kicked the can down the road with a lot of feel good bailouts and rescues. If the GOP makes the hard choices now, yeah, they'll be attacked by the left for it. But if the economy does recover and the debt drops significantly, then even the MSM will have a difficult time given Obama the credit after reporting that it was the GOP's doing.

At this rate, there will come a time when there aren't going to be enough tax payers making enough money to pay the interest on the debt. Then we won't need a fiscal cliff to cut all of the bennies, they will be cut for lack of funds to pay for them. Then we'll be in the very situation we spent billions trying to prevent. What would have been the point?

To quote Reagan, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"