The following is from an editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News:
We keep waiting for our National Voices of Reason — also known as Andy Borowitz and/or the Onion — to weigh in on the sequester waiver that Congress gave last week to our neediest: impatient airline passengers.
The sequester — an austerity program enacted by Congress to reduce the deficit and, in the process, ruin the fragile recovering economy by imposing severe across-the-board cuts to spending — went into effect March 1.
Days after furloughs for air-traffic controllers were imposed as part of the sequester, Congress moved quickly to give the FAA more flexibility to keep passengers from the inconvenience of waiting in line for flights.
Then Congress headed to the airport to go on vacation.
We figure that the Borowitz Report and the Onion stayed silent because their heads exploded. That's the only sane reaction to this latest outrage from Congress — which miraculously keeps topping its own outrages — the last being the defeat of gun-control measures that most Americans said they wanted, days after the Boston bombing.
For perspective, airline passengers aren't the only victims of the massive cuts that the government is imposing, which trim 7.9 percent from defense spending and about 8.2 percent from domestic spending.
The sequester also will hurt Head Start, stop the delivery of meals to the elderly, stop some cancer patients from getting chemotherapy and likely throw public-housing families out on the streets, among other items.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the sequester will lead to the loss of a million jobs.
And a new report suggests that it could delay the trial for Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev because of cuts to the federal public-defenders' office.
Way to go, Congress!