Tag: Sequestration
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The shutdown: what’s it all about, Alfie?
Congress is threatening to send me back to work tomorrow. As of this writing (about 4PM ET) the final votes have not been taken but the thinking is that the Senate will approve the proposed “compromise”. House Republicans, bruised and bloodied, will allow Democrats and its few moderate Republicans to pass the bill. The real…
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Furlough Diary, Day 13
I’m running out of places inside my house to paint and patch. The lower level is now completely repainted. I finished that project last week when I repainted the back of one door that I had neglected in the spring. The walls consisting of our master bedroom closets and vanity have been repainted. The master…
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Furlough Diary, Day 8
Things are “curiouser and curiouser”, as Alice put it. However, Wonderland is a lot less baffling than Washington, D.C. in the midst of a massive government shutdown. I keep expecting things to make sense but in really there is no sense in all this. It feels a lot more like Catch 22 than Alice in…
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Furlough Diary, Day 3
Our bathtub is looking real nice after its caulking yesterday. With time to spare and prohibited from even touching a government-owned device, this currently “non-excepted” i.e. furloughed federal employee has time to play Tooltime Tim. Unfortunately, I’m not terribly skilled at home improvement, given how I messed up my last three attempts to caulk our…
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A not so little Little Rock, Arkansas
Sequester madness is abating a little bit. There will be no furloughs in my agency, at least through the end of the fiscal year. I am not sure exactly how we are really saving any money. At least here within the water community, a lot of it is probably coming from funding fewer stream gauges.…
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The big squeeze
Job growth in March was a measly 88,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.6 percent, but this was largely because many people stopped looking for work. The economy had been looking pretty promising earlier in the year, with steady job growth well in excess of 100,000 jobs a month. Now we will likely be…
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My crystal ball on how the sequester will play out
Lots of pundits are puzzling through the politics of the federal sequester that began March 1, trying to figure out how long it will last and what the end game will be. If it were simply a matter of exercising common sense, it would have never occurred in the first place. Neither party claims it…
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Burning through the seed corn
Debt ceiling. Fiscal cliff. Continuing resolutions. Sequestration. So many names but it’s all the same game: it’s Washington’s version of high stakes poker where no one gives an inch until the last minute and maybe not then. This time the game is the sequestration that begins March 1. The prevailing political wisdom is that no…
Occam's Razor 