Pentagon may lay off thousands if defense spending cuts go through

[mia]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pentagon-lay-thousands-defense-spending-cuts-article-1.1123053

WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of civilian employees in the Defense Department could receive warnings about potential layoffs four days before the November election if impending spending cuts aren’t averted, hitting presidential battleground states such as Virginia and Florida hard.

The alerts would come in addition to any that major defense contractors might send out at the same time to their workers under an often-overlooked law, a prospect that is unnerving the White House roughly three months before voters go to the polls....

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday that any deal to stave off the cuts would require tax increases on high-wage earners, which Republicans oppose.

“You know we have a situation where defense cuts that the president believes are much too deep, that Republicans and Democrats believe are much too deep as well as non-defense cuts. Republicans would allow those to go into place rather than asking millionaires and billionaires to pay a little bit more,” Carney said.

[truedelphi]

1. Oh thousands to be laid off, YADA YADA YADA.

We spend TRILLIONS on defense every year. It basically is a Fat Cat entitlement program, with billion dollar jets that don't work getting brought into production, with weaponry given away to places that don't help us, with cost overruns. Plus, I am sure the equivalent of the $ 600 toilet seat is back, now that Barbara Boxer worries more about the tea Party than cost overruns.

Once we get rid of those expense s and trim down the military spending, and put the money into the pockets of real Americans, you would see tens of thousands of people working in place of the "thousands" that got laid off.

Enough is enough already.

We really do not need a military budget that is equivalent to the military budgets of the next 23 nations combined.

[99Forever]

2. Good.

How about we "lay off" about half of our bloated, wasteful military and spend the savings on 21st century infrastructure and green energy?

It would be a good start.

[truedelphi]

3. Here is a chart that plainly, crisply shows the cost to Fed Government of

These programs:



We are losing our schools and libraries, our art programs, our fire fighters, our environmental protections, and procastinating on repairing our infrastructure, while the Military carries on like there is no tomorrow. Let's get real and cut this monstrous glob of payments down to a decent size.

[mia]

5. Shift those tens of thousands of jobs over to those that will

support American jobs and improve our infrastructure.

[RedStateLiberal]

6. Seems like common sense to me

especially when we're winding down our wars.

I wonder what it's going to take for the American people to wake up and realize where our tax dollars are really going and how it could be better utilized here at home when we desperately need it.

[hack89]

25. What the hell does that actually mean?

how do you shift a job?

[Major Nikon]

16. It's actually worse than that

Many federal agencies support the military in one way or another. Those costs are substantial and aren't included in "military" spending.

[truedelphi]

27. That is very true. Some pacifists who have analyzed the budget

Feel that a full 95% of all monies spent by the Federal Government ends up being in some way connected to the military. For instance, the Military Services all rely on Federal highways and the sponsorship of the railroad lines in order to haul the military equipment form one point to another.

[Booster]

4. The Pentagon has only itself to blame. Remember during the Bush Admin when the Pentagon

"lost" almost 3 trillion dollars - lost, as in "haven't a clue where it went". Remember the 8 billion in cash on pallets in Iraq that just "disappeared". Politicians at the time said it wasn't being watched closely and it was "pilfered". PILFERED??? Give me a break. And nobody questioned it. The attitude was "shit happens". If Republicans were truly conservative they would have been yelling their heads off, but since it was Repugs in office - not a word. Of course I can't totally blame them cause the Dems didn't say a word either. I have no idea how many people work in the Pentagon but I'll bet the fat could be trimmed just a little. You can bet a whole lot of those civilians have accounts in the Cayman's also.

[Xolodno]

7. Question is....

....how many of those will be in red congressional districts? Or districts with only one industry, that being military. Thats the real panic in this. If its in a red district, then God forbid....they may have to rely on "entitlements"...then suddenly being with the party that wants to cut the very funding that puts food on your table doesn't sound so good.

When Boeing lost some huge contracts in Seattle way back when, they thought it would be the death of the city. But when all those engeneers were turned loose, some started up their own business on ideas they had been tinkering with for awhile and they ended up creating new industries. The same may or may not happen...but none the less, it doesn't come without "growing pains".

And the politician who stood his ground on ideaology instead of what was good for his constituents could get the boot. At the end of the day, people would rather pay out a percent or two in taxes and have a job with income, than rely on unemployment and look for jobs that just aren't there at the moment.

[mia]

8. "At the end of the day, people would rather pay out a percent or two in taxes and have a job..."

Well said!

[Igel]

10. Doesn't matter.

All that somebody has to do is dig up some articles from a few months ago.

They didn't make a splash. The (R) House was floating a measure that would violate the budget sequestration agreement. They would produce a budget that did not have the DOD cuts and send it off to the Senate. Obama said "no" and that he'd veto it before, I think, the Senate could even opine on the matter. You follow the agreement, he said. IIRC, even finding ways of "paying" for the reinstatement of DOD funding was a no-no, unless it involved increased revenues.

In other words, "you'd rather let thousands of hard-working Americans get laid off rather than tax the rich" has a comeback: You'd used the jobs of hardworking American service members as pawns in an attempt to to force us to let income taxes rise.

Don't worry. After a few more dance moves in which each assumes his own position is a law of nature that must be assumed true and not questioned, they'll find a compromise. How long it takes depends on who believes they can milk this mouse the most.

[L0oniX]

9. Gee maybe we better cut funding for pensions and SS and Medicare to help out the MIC.

...and of course congress needs another pay raise.

[Nativo13]

17. Congressional Pay Raises Are Automatic

Until the 1990s Congress had to pass a law each year in order to give itself a pay raise. Some politicians made politics out of it and most politicians dreaded facing the vote, but they wanted the money.
Some genius came up with a new law that each year would automatically give the Congress a raise unless it was voted down.
Since then their salaries have doubled.

[lunatica]

11. And they would be able to get jobs with the money that's saved being

invested into creating other kinds of jobs. The government has the ability and the means to create jobs that aren't connected to the MIC.

[tammywammy]

13. That would defeat the entire purpose of this.

This was supposed to be major cuts, 50/50 defense/non-defense as debt reduction. The government cannot, as of now, use money 'saved' on defense and spend it on non-defense program.

[tammywammy]

12. I work for a defense contractor.

We've been told conditional WARN notices will go out in November. Part of the issue is that Congress has given no indication on where the cuts are coming from. So the company doesn't know which programs are getting what cut, and which employees would then be laid off. And since Congress probably won't do anything, direction or pushing sequestration off another year or passing something that removes or modifies sequestration, a company could essentially need to give WARN notices to all employees with final notice given just days before the new year.

I have heard that another defense contractor is planning furlough days for certain employees instead of a layoff, for now.

I should be okay if there's a layoff, but there are a lot of worried people I work with.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

14. On the defense side this will hit civil servants, support contractors, and defense contractors

The support contractors will get hit the hardest. The civil servants will be offered incentives to retire, and some lower priority defense program will get cut.

No one seems to care about the impact to the non defense side of the Federal budget. If every department has to take fare share, any number of support programs, including those the newly laid off could use, will be hurt.

Those who say "just move the dollars out of defense" have no clue about was sequestration means.

[tammywammy]

19. Plus, it also will hit the vendors used as well

The businesses making parts and such. One thing people aren't taking into consideration, say the government cuts a defense contract. The defense contractor goes to the vendor saying that instead of the 100 parts they had contracted for they only need 50. The vendor will say that's a break of the contract and demand the payment which the defense contractor is only going to push back to the government.

There's a smart way to make cuts and sequestration isn't it for both defense and non-defense. Congress will do something, but probably not until the lame duck session. They'll either do something to completely modify sequestration or they'll just push it off so cuts won't take place until 2014. Nothing will happen until after November.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

21. One thing will happen before the elections...the WARN notices will go out

Not sure if that is chance or just bad luck

[mia]

24. Thanks for the clarification.

The latest connotation of "sequestration" was unclear to me. The following helped to clear it up a bit more.

http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/sequestration

Sequestration
Originally a legal term referring generally to the act of valuable property being taken into custody by an agent of the court and locked away for safekeeping, usually to prevent the property from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved. But the term has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure originally provided for in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 -- an effort to reform Congressional voting procedures so as to make the size of the Federal government's budget deficit a matter of conscious choice rather than simply the arithmetical outcome of a decentralized appropriations process in which no one ever looked at the cumulative results until it was too late to change them. If the dozen or so appropriation bills passed separately by Congress provide for total government spending in excess of the limits Congress earlier laid down for itself in the annual Budget Resolution, and if Congress cannot agree on ways to cut back the total (or does not pass a new, higher Budget Resolution), then an "automatic" form of spending cutback takes place. This automatic spending cut is what is called "sequestration."

Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is "sequestered" by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress. In theory, every agency has the same percentage of its appropriation withheld in order to take back the excessive spending on an "across the board" basis. However, Congress has chosen to exempt certain very large programs from the sequestration process (for example, Social Security and certain parts of the Defense budget), and the number of exempted programs has tended to increase over time -- which means that sequestration would have to take back gigantic shares of the budgets of the remaining programs in order to achieve the total cutbacks required, virtually crippling the activities of the unexempted programs.

The prospect of sequestration has thus come to seem so catastrophic that Congress so far has been unwilling actually to let it happen. Instead, Congress has repeatedly chosen simply to raise the Budget Resolution spending caps upward toward the end of the legislative session in order to match the actual totals already appropriated, thus largely wiping out the incentives that the reformed budget procedures were expected to provide for Congress to get better control of the budget deficit.

[spanone]

15. threats....

[lovuian]

18. America is bankrupt just like the British Empire

the Military complex has drained us dry War after War after War after Police Action

America can not spend anymore money on the wars ....the Greed of the Corporations
has drained the country dry and now the military will not be there to defend them


we don't have the MONEY

Corporations need an army to protect them.....and the military budget has swallowed up the country

It has to go down ....it can't continue

[Comrade_McKenzie]

20. Good riddance. nt

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

22. Not to mention thousands of UNION manufacturing & production private defense jobs.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

23. This is not true. Government doesn't create jobs, as the GOP always reminds us

There must be some mistake.

[Scuba]

26. We didn't win the arms race, the Soviets just lost first....

... now it's apparently our turn.