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Bad news for Meals on Wheels. The congressional supercommittee has failed to come up with a plan to slash the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion.
Failure to reach an agreement triggers $600 billion in automatic spending cuts in domestic programs, including the delivery of meals to homebound elderly people, and another $600 billion from defense programs, as The Bay Citizen reported.
President Barack Obama said that any attempt by Congress to avoid those cuts without reducing the deficit won't fly. "I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic cuts to domestic and defense spending," the president said at a news conference in the White House on Monday afternoon.
But the cuts, which are set to start in 2013, could still be averted, he said, if Congress finds some other way to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion before they kick in. "They've still got a year to figure it out," Obama said.
In Alameda County, more than 3,500 residents receive more than 537,000 home-delivered meals each year. The federal government provides nearly $2 million in funding to Meals on Wheels programs in the county each year, accounting for the majority of the programs' budgets.
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
Liberal Citizen
We have presidential and congressional elections before any budget cuts are enacted in 2013. Today's decision is more about hyper-journalism than reality.
Helene Gelber-Lehman
Can you please do a piece on Grover Norquist and the pledge he required republican Congress candidates to sign in order to get his "Backing"!
The inordinate abuse of power this one man seems to have exerted over this country should be blasted in the media and he should be indicted for extortion or treason. This is the kind of abuse of power that THE OTHER 99 are rebelling against and yet GROVER NORQUIST is still not known to mist Americans as the source of the republican's refusal to tax the rich.