Sen. Marco Rubio penned a Sunday op-ed in the Pensacola News Journal drawing attention to the downed 2013 Blue Angels’ event, and the subsequently quiet weekend at Pensacola Beach, and isolated blame for its canceling on an administration that “can’t prioritize its budgeting decisions”.
Rubio acknowledges that, relatively speaking, the Blue Angels event is only the surface of far deeper impacts being felt in communities throughout the nation — but also suggests that by making the Blues the culprit of our debt, the President continues makes a charade of slimming down government rather than truly doing so.
Rubio writes:
“This weekend, the skies over Pensacola Beach were not filled with the usual roar of F/A-18 Hornets or Fat Albert’s four turboprops. There were considerably fewer people flocking to the white sand beaches from Fort Pickens to Via DeLuna. And Little Sabine Bay had fewer boats parked in its waters than in years past. The Blues were grounded this weekend all because of a feckless decision made two years ago more than 900 miles away in Washington, D.C.
Two years ago, the so-called “sequester” was conceived by President Obama as part of the deal to raise the nation’s debt limit and allow the federal government to borrow and spend trillions more. As painful as the canceling of the Blue Angels’ 2013 season has been for Pensacola, it is symbolic of a government that can’t prioritize its budgeting decisions, and the much deeper impacts being felt in communities throughout America. It’s even more infuriating when you take into account how the Blue Angels figure in the grand scheme of our $3.8 trillion federal budget… For President Obama to continue the charade of making things like the Blue Angels the culprits of our debt and, therefore, the first thing on the chopping block when government must slim down is an insult to the American people.
President Obama’s administration should be ashamed for trying to convince the American people that our only choices when it comes to dealing with the debt are either to leave government as big and bloated as it is, or accept a new reality where our people have to endure longer lines at the airport, endless flight delays, the loss of safety net medical assistance, the denial of education services, and many other inconveniences and negative effects to people’s day-to-day lives.”
For his part in the mess, Rubio wrote that he never liked the sequester idea in the first place and voted against it as part of the Budget Control Act that raised the debt ceiling “without any real spending or pro-growth reforms.”
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