Sequestration, like many of the issues raised by the current administration, requires a few grains of salt to digest. Actually, to swallow the kind of exaggeration coming from the White House in the past month, you will need to uncap the salt shaker and invert it all over your evening’s political dish.
It’s been quite a show, and the Obama administration has always shown a particular gift for theater. Since the 2012 election, President Barrack Obama’s traveling band of players have been at their best, working around the clock to bring you fantastical reproductive rights you didn’t know you had, a heart-wrenching campaign against guns that kill people, all while convincing everyone that spending cuts are “expensive.” Now playing: “Sequestration: A Meltdown worse than the ones we’ve already saved you from.” It stars President Obama, a compassionate populist who has promised to put the middle class on his back, but faces bitter opposition from a nasty gang of Republicans who are unwilling to enact policy that will endanger the fortunes of their rich buddies.
The crisis is simple. At the end of the month, a series of federal budget provisions will expire, and a 3% cut in annual federal spending will come as a result. If President Obama and the Republicans can’t come to an agreement on new appropriations before then, all of these federal programs—Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Veteran’s Benefits, Medicaid—will not be affected. Since there’s only $3.5 trillion to go around, that 3% rounds out to $105 billion in essential services lost.
What I’ve taken from the show is probably much different from the message its authors intended. Sincere or not, the fact that the administration is able to whine about a 3% reduction in spending to any avail reflects very poorly on our culture. If people are capable of being scared of shaving 3% off the side, while sparing the ineradicable Social Security, then America has lost a rational perspective on government spending.
Further, it is silly to talk about spending as if it’s an isolated issue, like Congress’ account-keeping at the end of the year or something. What our government spends, what it takes from taxpayers, defines it. Size of government is the size of its budget, and our government is sitting on the fattest budget in human history. It’s grown by nearly a trillion dollars since 2007, and what have we got to show for it? Steady unemployment, government-dependent auto companies, and a not-at-all populist notion that some businesses are just too big to fail, to name a few things.
I chalk it all up to the common good nature of the American people. We’re not all cynical yet. We want to believe when someone talks of a coming apocalypse that people don’t joke about things like that. Unfortunately, politicians are more than willing to exploit our good nature and send their caravans of players running through our states and across television screens, all in the hopes of securing our votes and not our welfare.
