The Cuts No Cne Believes Will Come
July 11, 2012
Amid all the chatter on Capitol Hill about looming defense cuts, there's one thing no one's saying out loud: The cuts will probably never happen.
Despite the gloom and doom from the Pentagon, the hand-wringing from Republicans and the resistance to changing the so-called sequester from Hill Democrats, the conventional wisdom among people involved in negotiations is that there will probably be a compromise to avoid the $500 billion in cuts.
Republicans in a bipartisan working group are openly talking about finding new revenue as a way to temporarily stave off the defense cuts. The White House budget director wrote in an op-ed Tuesday that the sequester "wasn't meant to be implemented."
And Pentagon officials insist there's no way such deep cuts would ever go into effect.