Obama Deliberately Disrupting Air Travel

Obama is deliberately trying to amplify the effect of the ever-so-small sequester spending cuts. His strategy has been to portray small 4% spending cuts as "draconian," so his genius administrators and him have decided to maximize air traveler inconvenience and then blame it on the Republicans. I hope the public can see how despicable this is.  It also exposes how poorly the government is managed and argues loudly for less government, not more.

Obama is determined to "prove" that big government is better and that there is zero room for ANY spending cuts.

It's time to run this guy out of town on a rail.   Tar and feathers would be equally suitable.

Air travelers already pay the majority of the FAA budget through air fare fees, so the 'damage' should be limited, right?.   There's where you're wrong thanks to our affirmative action President!  People, you're getting what you deserve!  Here's the Wall Street Journal exposing the sorry state of affairs.

Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can't deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won't arrive on time.

It Gets Worse

From the same WSJ article,

Legally speaking, the sequester applies at a more general level known as "accounts." The air traffic account includes 15,000 controllers out of 31,000 employees. The White House could keep the controllers on duty simply by allocating more furlough days to these other non-essential workers.

...the FAA is even imposing the controller furlough on every airport equally, not prioritizing among the largest and busiest airports. San Francisco's Napa Valley airport with no commercial service will absorb the same proportion of the cuts as the central New York radar terminal, which covers La Guardia, JFK and Newark International, as well as MacArthur, Teterboro, New Haven, Republic and other regional fields.

Like most government work, productivity continues to decline. Staffing of air traffic controllers has remained the same but the number of flights have dropped 23% since the late 1990s, so there's an overstaffing issue and a PUBLIC UNION issue as well.

More Federal Government Incompetence

For more than a decade the FAA has promised to modernize and make the civil aviation system more efficient and reliable, but the only things it has reliably generated are delays or cost overruns or usually both. The project, known as NextGen, is four years off schedule with no end in sight.

The FAA's troubles are the result of bad management and a lack of oversight, according to multiple Department of Transportation Inspector General audits. A 2011 investigation found that one part of NextGen ran $330 million over budget—or half of the FAA sequester—and then the FAA paid the contractor responsible $150 million in bonuses that were supposed to be an incentive for making the budget targets. The overruns are now approaching $500 million, and that's merely one item.

This administration is a shining example of why the government deserves LESS of your tax dollars and LESS of a role in the economy not MORE as Obama and Democrats insist!  As as many functions of the Federal Government as possible should be devolved to The States because everything the Federal government touches is mismanaged to the Nth degree.  See How to Cut $450 Billion in Federal Spending.   See Healthcare Law Shows Obama's Inability to Govern.  

It's time to reverse course and seriously reduce government expenditures.  The sequester cuts are peanuts compared to the task required.