Skift Take
In a case of “you don’t know how good you have it until it’s gone,” the budget cuts have awakened Americans to the significance of their natural and cultural institutions.
Andy Foyil, a fifth-grade social studies teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is taking 30 students on a field trip to Washington this month. A White House tour was to be the highlight.
“Their faces just dropped,” Foyil said as he described the reaction of 11-year-olds being told federal spending cuts will keep them out of America’s most famous home. “The White House is always one of our hope-fors.”
With spring vacations looming, popular destinations from Florida’s Gulf Stream waters to California’s redwood forest are now implementing mandatory U.S. spending cuts, know as sequestration, that started this month. The failure of Congress and President Barack Obama to agree on reducing the deficit triggered $85 billion in cuts by Sept. 30 that are to be split between defense and non-defense spending.
Across the nation, 54 percent of Americans polled in late February wanted Congress to delay the cuts and give the economy more time to recover, and 3 in 5 backed tax increases along with spending cuts, according to the Bloomberg News poll. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Bradford DeLong, a University of California at Berkeley economist, in a study found increased spending would help revive growth and boost tax revenue by more than the cost of the expenditures.
Longer lines
With Congress and the White House deadlocked, visitors to landmarks run by the National Park Service will confront longer lines, dirtier bathr
