President Obama speaks as U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner looks on during the presidential inauguration on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 21 Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
With all feel-good talk about immigration reform, fans of conflict and dysfunction may fear the arrival of genuine bipartisanship in Washington.
Not to worry! Another budget crisis is almost upon us! This time it?s not the dread fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling, but rather the ?sequester??the extremely crude cutting mechanism that essentially nobody favors but that seems likely to happen anyway. It?ll drag down the economy, impair the functioning of the government across the board, and do nothing to improve America?s fiscal sustainability over the long run.
Here?s what you need to know.
What is it? Sequestration is broad, automatic, across-the-board cuts to most categories of government spending. These are scheduled to take effect on March 1. Social Security, Medicaid, targeted anti-poverty programs, military pay, and the operational cost of ongoing wars are exempted. Benefits for Medicare patients won?t be touched, but payment rates to providers will. Everything else is getting the ax. And it?s not a small ax. Affected military programs will be cut by 16.3 percent, and domestic discretional programs will be cut by 9.2 percent.
How did this happen? It all goes back to the bipartisan disaster of the 2011 debt-ceiling talks. Historically, the occasional need for the executive branch to request congressional permission to borrow money had been an opportunity for grandstanding. But flush with victory, House Republicans decided to attempt to extract substantive policy concessions in the form of spending cuts. Rather than stare them down as Obama did successfully earlier this year or avert the crisis by exploiting the platinum coin loophole, Obama chose to negotiate, seeking a ?grand bargain? to reduce the deficit. What emerged was the sequester.
So the sequester is a bipartisan deal that everyone supports? Quite the opposite! The debt ceiling was a hard deadline, but neither side wanted to give up on the grand bargain. So they raised the debt ceiling limit and appointed a ?supercommittee? to continue the bargaining. The sequester was meant to be a stick?something everyone agreed was a terrible idea?that provided members of the supercommittee with an incentive to agree to an alternative means of deficit reduction. The cuts were evenly divided between defense and non-defense segments to give Democrats and Republicans equal pressure to seek an alternative.
What?s so bad about spending cuts? Two things. One is that a time of high unemployment and ultra-low interest rates is a strange time to be cutting spending. Putting a credible deal in place to cut spending over the long term might be helpful, but actually reducing expenditures in 2013 will hurt the recovery. The cuts are also poorly structured. Common sense says that some of the government?s discretionary programs are more important than others, and that you want to cut the less useful programs rather than the more useful ones. The sequester makes no judgment about the merits and no effort at cost-benefit analysis. Things are just cut willy-nilly.
How much spending is being cut exactly? A total of $52 billion in 2013 with the number rising steadily each subsequent year to a total of approximately $1.2 trillion over 10 years. A bit less than 10 percent of that total is estimated to be lower interest rate costs since the government will be borrowing less. The rest is program cuts.
What?s the economic impact going to be? In the short term, it will be pretty severe. Goldman Sachs? Alec Phillips thinks we could see almost a full percentage point cut off growth in the second and third quarters of GDP. The most visible initial impact will be civilian layoffs at the Pentagon and furloughs at defense contractors. Other impacts will be a bit harder to see. A nearly 10 percent cut in Section 8 housing assistance vouchers, for example, won?t directly lead to layoffs. But the hardship inflicted on low-income families will mean reduced sales for the businesses they patronize with downstream consequences. All told, the Bipartisan Policy Center thinks full implementation could lead to a million fewer jobs next year.
How about the impact on programs? It?s difficult to predict. The essence of the sequester is that agencies have very little authority to prioritize in the cuts. The statutory language says cuts must happen at the ?program-project-activity? level?i.e., you can?t do double cuts in one program to spare another from the ax?but the technical meaning of this is unclear for some agencies. This is going to create implementation problems for large procurement initiatives or construction projects. You can?t really buy 89 percent of an aircraft carrier or build 92 percent of a dam. Consequently, the aggregate level of disruption will probably be bigger than the percentage cuts suggest. On the military side, since troop pay and the ongoing war in Afghanistan are spared, the cuts in future weapons programs and other procurement will be very big.
But at least this fixes the deficit, right? Not really. Certainly the deficit is made lower by these cuts. But the deficit right now isn?t a problem. The thing people worry about is the long-term budget implications of the aging population and rising health care costs. Yet the sequester doesn?t touch programs related to those issues.
So why doesn?t Congress just call the whole thing off? Republicans want to cancel the defense sequester and replace it with cuts in programs for low-income people. Democrats still favor a grand bargain that raises taxes and trims entitlements. Republicans are still against raising taxes. Congress tried to bluff itself and now it?s prepared to call its own bluff.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=0841558d4b2f2c406b05effbaf87860a
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Good news when it comes to Greenwood Real Estate as well as on a National level! The National Association of Realtors recently reported that total existing-home sales, (completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops) rose 5.9 percent to an adjusted annual rate of 5.04 million in November from a downwardly revised 4.76 million in October, and are 14.5 percent higher than the 4.40 million-unit pace in November 2011. Sales are at the highest level since November 2009 when the annual pace spiked at 5.44 million.
Dear Lifehacker,
You can't type with all your fingers on a mobile phone, so you need to figure out where your strengths lie: typing with one finger or two thumbs. The same goes for many tablets, unless you have a 10" version that allows enough room for both hands and all fingers (even if it is a little cramped).
You may know how to type on a keyboard, but you're reading this post because you've realized that touchscreen typing is a different animal. For this reason, it helps to learn how to type from scratch and apps can help. On iOS, TapTyping ($4) will help you practice. TypingWeb is a free web-based alternative designed for iOS, but should work just fine on Android as well. Solely on Android, My Typing Tutor (Free) and Type It! (Free) offer a few interesting game-like methods of improving your touchscreen typing skills, but we're not sure how much they'll really help in the long run. Typing Practice (Free), however, offers a more straightforward method of honing your skills.
The digital keyboard that comes with your iPhone or Android isn't bad, but that doesn't mean it can't get better. While iOS limits the alteration of your keyboard, Android offers many alternative options. You may want to survey a few and figure out which one is right for you, but as of late SwiftKey has risen to the top as a favorite keyboard upgrade on Android. A new keyboard can provide better predictive text features, gesture typing that allows you to form words without lifting your finger, and more. Android 4.2 added some of these features, but few devices have that update.
You can only type so fast on a touchscreen, so don't make your life any harder than it has to be. Text expansion (or typing shortcuts), the typing miracle that allows you to input a short amount of text and have it expand into a longer block of text, saves hours of typing in the long run. We love it on the desktop, and it's even more useful on mobile devices. On Android, Textspansion is our top pick for an app that can add this functionality system-wide. As usual, iOS doesn't allow apps to alter the system but, fortunately, Apple actually added text expansion to iOS 5 (and up). Setting up a few typing shortcuts can save you a ton of time typing phone numbers, your address, common emails, common phrases, and more. If you're not sure where to start, check out this post for some ideas.