I have a sidebar with a background color and a border. I would like to move that sidebar down 50px so that it matches up with an icon in my body background. I can do this with the position element, but then it breaks the footer. Padding only scoots the internal stuff down, not the border/background. Margin has no effect on the sidebar.

Is there a way to workaround this? I have some super-hack ideas of forcing this but I'm hoping for a CSS solution. Either making the height 50px fewer than it displays or finding a way to bring in the top/bottom margin so that it effectively shrinks it.

Can't say. Without seeing the site it would all be guesses.