Only in Washington can the specter of reducing federal
spending by 1% - or perhaps, more accurately, reducing the rate of growth by 1-2% - be treated as the end of days and only
with a grossly uninformed public can this type of deception work. Politicians shifting facts in order to shape
their agendas is hardly news but sequestration has ratcheted the derp level to
weapons grade.
The same president who initially suggested and, later signed,
the sequester agreement is now busily campaigning against it, largely because
campaigning is all he knows. Predictably
on cue, the alleged cuts are branded as “devastating”, “extreme”, and a host of
other scare words that include dire warnings of children eating old people in
the streets, week-long waits at airport security lines, and no new cheetahs as
the National Zoo. (The last is actually
part of the discussion.) Who knew
that when Hillary raised the “phone call at 3 AM” question that time of day
would be the independent variable?
On the other side, the same House Speaker who proclaimed
that he
“got 98% of what I wanted” in the sequester agreement is now couching it terms
that make one think its impact on defense will mean North Korea taking over
Hawaii by next week with the rest of the republic to be ravaged by Islamic
hordes a few days after that. But this
is what political gamesmanship will get you.
Boehner and the Repubs surprised Obama by agreeing to the sequester because
they thought Romney would win and the deal could effectively be scuttled.
Let’s put the whole thing in context – federal spending is
guided by an evil called baseline budgeting which presumes an annual increase in
spending regardless of circumstances. So
when the planned 8% rate of growth is held to 6%, the political class claims a
2% cut. It’s like your boss deciding
that your 5% raise will only be 3% and you complaining of a salary
reduction.
Sequester or not, the feds are going to spend more this year
than last; no one outside of DC confuses this with an actual cut. Ergo, the president’s perpetual campaign
remains in motion, spreading its message of fear that the very thing he once
championed will now usher in a parade of horribles. Meanwhile, the Obama dogwashing committee is impervious
to fact, even turning on one-time favored
son Bob Woodward. In our modern
politics-as-religion world, the only thing worse than a heretic is an apostate;
how dare Woodward act like a reporter instead of a stenographer.
When federal spending is close to 4-trillion dollars a year, close to half of it with borrowed money,
and the prospect of reducing that rate of growth by 85-billion causes heads to spin, one conclusion is that tinfoil has
become the nation’s default headgear. And even if spending were being cut by 1-2%,
pretending that it signals the collapse of empire is delusion at an exponential
level.
Consider how many Americans have managed to trudge on
despite income stagnation if not outright reduction over the past several years. Yet, govt pretends that it is sacrosanct in
that regard. Even its unholy trinity of
waste, fraud, and abuse is absent from this discussion as if talk of
controlling spending renders all three of those concerns moot, that not a
single nickel of federal spending is unnecessary and that to believe otherwise
is unpatriotic and probably insane.
Predictably, the partisans have circled their respective
wagons and are dutifully blaming each other for something both sides agreed to
do, something neither side spent much time discussing during the 2012 campaign. Then again, neither Team Red nor Team Blue
has much of an interest in actually cutting spending; the Reds like to talk about cuts and the Blues have never
met a dollar of someone else’s money that could not be spent. And the debt marches on.
Perhaps just as predictably, this too shall pass, much like
the fiscal cliff before it. The problem,
of course, will not be solved largely because both sides refuse to meaningfully
acknowledge that it exists and that resolving it means there can be no sacred
cows. Instead, look for a continuation
of the sacred bull that always surfaces when the topic of spending comes up,
because DC knows it can get away with that.
How else do you explain a proposed $2-million dollar cut from the
proposed $20-million dollar budget of an agency
that no longer exists?
