Have you ever uttered a phrase or statement, then someone repeats it and better articulates the true meaning? Like finishing your sentence for you. Only it’s a news article.
Here is is:
How America became a third world country
The politicians who tweeted while America burned are dismantling our society piece by piece with budget cuts.
The streets are so much darker now since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury, and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.
It’s 2023 – this is America a decade years after the federal budget cuts known as sequestration. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Traveling back in time to 2013 – the moment the cuts began – no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States looking more like a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested – and won – special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568bn to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon. [ Guardian ]
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