i just served my mother-in-law your chicken noodle soup but she loved it so much. i told her it was homemade. everyone tells a little white lie now and then. but now she wants my recipe [ clears his throat ] [ softly ] she s right behind me isn t she? [ male announcer ] progresso. you gotta taste this soup. look outside, if you are in the northern half of the country, you are likely looking at snow or facing subfreezing temperatures. yes, it is february, the heart of winter, but for much of the united states, it has been one for the record books. what s behind this season s cruel weather and how is it affecting everything from travel to your job? we have assembled an a-list panel, gaven smith is a climateologist, josh marks is
you average over all that. it s a little bit unclear what the whether there s a connection between how wavy this this is and climate change. there are interesting ideas out there but nothing that you can say, we can blame it on the polar bears or blame it on something else. another thing that is directly affected is definitely travel. let s go to josh marks who will talk with us about the weather. thousands of flights canceled or delayed due to this weather. what has been the ripple effect that has been brought about by all this? it s as gavin said, the meandering of the jet stream and the breadth of cities that have been impacted this winter is the telltale sign for the airline industry as to what s creating the majority of the disruption. there s not a single major hub airport east of the mississippi with the exception of miami that hasn t been shut down in one form or another by the winter weather this year. that s what s driving cancellation numbers higher than anything we ve
white house blamed congress for passing the sequester. josh you say the faa s problems started long before this latest rouchbd cuts. the faa has been struggling for decades now with an air traffic control system based on antiquated technology. it is inefficient to run the radar based system and take as lot of controllers to do so. when you have a situation like we did this week where you have a 10% cut in manpower, the effects are immediately felt in the system, and the predictions that there was going to be chaos in the air system didn t take long to manifest themselves, and throw in a little bit of bad weather early in the week in new york and the effects were very, very clear to everybody. josh, i know it was a pain. it was a real pain in the neck. was the flying public ever at risk? from a safety perspective, no, and of course the faa managed air space capacity in order to maintain the same level of safety. it was never a question of risk to the traveling public. it is just t
faa s work force had to take an unpaid day off. 5800 flies were delayed in the first three days of furloughs. that s compared to 2,500 delays over the same period last year. democrats had argued for a complete fix to the forced budget cuts but les than a week into the furloughs, your elected leaders have intervened to give the department of transportation more flexibility into determining how cuts are made. the problem is this is just a band-aid solution. the funding associated with the furloughs at the faa is i think, $253 million. that s one half of 1%. one half of 1% of the sequester. experience now can just be blamed on the usual misery of flying. nancy cook is an economic and fiscal policy correspondent for the national journal and josh marks, the executive director of the aviation institute. nancy, i want to start with you. one month into the forced budget cuts polls show around half of
house and try to get their cuts undone and i think we may not see that, though, for programs that hit low-ncome people, things like housing assistance, things like the head start, and people that don t necessarily have the same advocates or lobbying dollars as bigger industries. i think those people will still feel the cuts. nancy cook and josh, so nice to see both of you. thanks this morning. thanks. a tremendous show of support for victims of the boston marathon bombing through crowd funding online. more than $25 million from all over the world was raised in one week. what you need to know about those sites next.