Sequester Could Close
Tweed-New Haven Airport

Will anyone notice?

@New Haven Taxpayer: I will notice! I love flying out of Tweed. It's quick, convenient, and unlike many larger airports I have been to, the staff are friendly and helpful. If you do any amount of travelling, I highly recommend you try it. You can connect in Philly to almost anywhere you need to go.

When Obama first created the infamous 'Sequester', it was sold as cuts to the military that the Right would never allow to happen. How did it morph into something else? Somehow, methinks we are not being told the truth....

A metropolitan area of our size (over a million people) can't survive without an airport.

If the airport shuts down, I know a lot of people who may be leaving town.

I thought that the air traffic controllers were moved out of Tweed years ago. I believe that planes check in and out with an area control center in Long Island. if true, then the threat of closing Tweed for lack of ATCs is just a lot of smoke.

Tweed is the best airport in the state for getting in and out of on a daily basis. too bad we can not get more carriers to provide service

From your key strokes to God's ears - this would be awesome. No more dependency payments from the state or local taxpayers. The property could be redeveloped into a tax paying revenue generating entity and no more promises of another airline that never comes. There's a silver lining.

SaveOurCity:
Your description confuses it with the fiscal cliff, which was jointly created by Dems and Reps to have enough cuts to make both sides hurt, in an effort to prevent them from not handling it.

The Sequester is a more general cut which has never promised to be almost entirely military.

The White House released 1200 pages on it, detailing which agencies and departments would have their budgets cut.

If you did not read that, or if your favorite news outlet did not read that, then you have no axe to grind against Obama. Methinks you should complain to the news organizations (Rense? Fox?) that failed to accurately report on the provisions of the sequester (which has included airport staff since it was first proposed!) and instead presented a biased and incorrect bundle of information.

Streever: I admit that the fiscal cliff / debt ceiling / sequester news makes my head hurt to the point where I may be struggling to keep things straight.

My recollection was that in order to obtain bipartisan agreement on the debt ceiling in 2011, two things were set up to happen at the end of 2012 (after elections) 1) expiration of Bush cuts - which supposedly the D's would not allow and 2) A sequester that would create cuts 50% defense and 50% non-defense - which supposedly the R's would not allow.

Do you have detail to share that would help clarify for those of us with headaches?

In all fairness to you (and everyone else!) the details are quite confusing, and ultimately, these media-hyped non-catastrophe has been so poorly explained that I'm not surprised that it is running together.

The sequester is technically PART OF the Fiscal Cliff--it is the automatic cuts, and it was largely written by the Republicans. While certainly Obama had a role in it, the Congress and Senate are primarily responsible for it, and Obama's part in it is merely that he forged a compromise to keep the nation out of falling apart when the Senate and House refused to come to an agreement on the Fiscal Cliff.

I'm having two problems relaying your read on it:

The first is I've never seen (anywhere official or even unofficial) a break-down of 50/50. Most of the cuts take place over a long time period (up to 10 years! The military loses I believe 1 trillion in spending over a decade), not instantly, so it is hard to say what the actual split is. Spending levels vary every year, so we can't really predict what the budget will be in 8 years, to say what type of a cut the military will be.

The second is the rationale behind the deal. I've never seen it explained that way, and my understanding is that the main reason that Republicans and Democrats both would want to prevent the Fiscal Cliff is the same: if they fail to prevent it, the country would enter another recession. They didn't divvy it into two sides (that is the partisan press/simple media take on it).

The sequester is basically the cuts from the Fiscal Cliff. We found a way to perpetuate some of the Bush Tax Cuts (unfortuantely), and now we need to deal with the cuts.

The crucial thing I think is to understand that it isn't the type of spending that matters to individual constituencies: Dem or Rep or.... anything, we all pretty much boil it down to our ability to make a living.

Under full sequestration/fiscal cliff jumps, that disappears quickly. I believe the current estimation is a 2-3% increase in unemployment, a loss of GDP, and a very likely drop back into recession.

No lawmaker wants to be part of those consequences, even more than they want to cut defense spending/social programs/raise taxes.

You can read the Budget Control Act here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:s.365

ok this all confuses me and always has...so they get money from the city and the state because they do not make enough to support themselves. Right?

But JD said (and I am not sure if I am remembering this right) If we (city tax payers) do not subsidize them we will owe a ton of money because of some money they got from somewhere else would have to be paid back.

Does this not let us off the hook???

very interesting (maybe I could use a more descriptive word here) that both sides seem to agree that the sequester is terrible yet neither is willing to budge in order to help the people....and to almost quote three fifths, 80% of those who ran for re-election this past November were re-elected.

Just saw a TV piece about Bob Woodward calling out some in Washington who are trying to revise history on this topic. Here is a CNBC article with more detail;

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100491803

I've seen Woodward's take on it: notably, Woodward has been criticized heavily since Watergate (and even during Watergate) for producing highly inaccurate news, so I often take him with a grain of salt.

While he is an American icon, he tends to produce sheer massive quantities of unrelated data, before positing his own opinions as facts--he has also been caught inventing characters (the most notable criticism on this is Deep Throat--after Deep Throat was outed, it became apparent that Woodward made a fictional character out of several people suspected of being Deep Throat).

He is also extremely cosy with George Bush--I think he has written 4 books on him now--and twice presented propoganda for him.

Woodward said there was a "zero" percent chance of Iraq not possessing WMDs after personal conversations with Bush.

Later, he leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative. Love her or hate her, his actions probably led to the deaths of other operatives who worked with Plame, embedded in the Middle East. That was an awful move, and he was even told before he participated in leaking it--after the Bush White House gave him the information--that he was being used as a pawn.

He insisted that it was not the case, and said he knew a lot of secrets.

A court later found that he was indeed wrong, and setenced Scooter Libby, who had played a part in feeding him the leak. Bush later commuted the sentence of Libby.

I think it is notable that the person writing that article is an associate of Woodwards.

Basiclly, you have a guy who is friends with GW Bush, who has a history of fabrication in his articles, making claims about the Fiscal Cliff and the budget that don't add up, and then his friend writes an article for CNBC saying that Woodward is a good guy and an honest reporter: ultimately, I think that article solely demonstrates that CNBC is a pretty unbiased news source if they are willing to let friends of bad journalists write pieces about how honest and good those journalists are, while those journalists clearly have an interest in defending GW Bush and killing public discussion on the tax cuts.

Most of the problems we are in are due to the Bush tax cuts: expiring them is the right thing to do. I don't trust his friends to be unbiased in that.

If there were business in NH, airlines would be here. The airport is a nice perc for Yalies and other elites. NO ONE I know uses TWEED. It is a tiny airport.. The powers that be don't want that. NH is never satisfied to be what it is- a small nice college town. It wants to be NYC or Boston but cannot so it will bankrupt itself in the futile attempt.

Tweed has had a manned control tower since the 70's Out of the 6 airports on the list, tweed is the only one with airline service, Bridgeport lost its service years ago and with its short runways it will never see commercial service again. Ditto for the Groton-New London airport.
Tweed is a great airport with service to one of Usairways largest hubs. Hundreds of one connection cities out of tweed and once people try tweed, they enjoy the ease and stress free air travel tweed makes possible. I have used tweed many times over the years and it sure beats the drive to bradley and New york.