Sequestration Facts

And yes, Bob Woodward WILL regret making an ass of himself in the op-ed piece he wrote, because everyone now understands he didn't get the sequestration issue correct, and no one "threatened" him with anything except the possibility that he would look foolish. Q.E.D.

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein of the Washington Post give us the facts [not the drama]:


1. Blame Obama — the sequester was his White House’s idea. 


"In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts. After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. 

The sequester’s origins can’t be blamed on one person — or one party. Republicans insisted on a trigger for automatic cuts; Jack Lew, then the White House budget director, suggested the specifics, modeled after a sequester-like mechanism Congress used in the 1980s, but with automatic tax increases added. Republicans rejected the latter but, at the time, took credit for the rest. 

Obama took the deal to get a debt-ceiling increase. But the president never accepted the prospect that the sequester would occur, nor did he ever agree to take tax increases off the table. 



 2.) At least the automatic cuts will reduce runaway spending and begin to control the deficit. 

 What runaway spending? 

The $787 billion stimulus was a one-time expenditure that has come and gone. Under current law not including the sequester, non-defense discretionary spending as a share of the economy will shrink to a level not seen in 50 years. Defense spending grew substantially over the past decade, but that pattern has slowed and will soon end. Additional reductions must be achieved intelligently, tied to legitimate national security needs. Across-the-board cuts can have perverse effects on deficits; as services are cut, the fees users pay for those services are lost. For example, sequester-driven furloughs of air-traffic controllers will lead to the number of flights being reduced.



3. The amounts are so small, they won’t hurt much.

 The size of the automatic cuts this fiscal year, $85 billion, looks trivial compared with our $3.7 trillion federal budget. As Post columnist George F. Will has written: “Head for the storm cellar — spending will be cut 2.3 percent! Or: Washington chain-saw massacre — we must scrape by on 97.7 percent of current spending!”

 4. The cuts are so large, they will be catastrophic.

 The administration has released state-by-state estimates of the sequester and highlighted the cutbacks most likely to harm or inconvenience the public. The reality is not so immediate or dramatic. The damage will accumulate in less visible ways, as irrational reductions in public spending impede economic growth and job creation; reduce investments in education, infrastructure and scientific research; and further disrupt the routines of a modern democracy. The longer the sequester remains in place, the more harm is inflicted.

 5. This fight is all about money.

 Those who relish using a sequester — some House Republicans, along with a gaggle of radio talk-show hosts, editorial writers and cable television commentators — say this is one small step toward reducing U.S. deficits and debt. But if the goal were really debt reduction, it would be easy to get a bipartisan deal that would lower the debt enough to meet the original target set by the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, with roughly a third coming from revenue. The insistence on deep discretionary-spending reductions while calling for even deeper tax cuts shows that the sequester is not about money but about taking a meat ax to government as we know it."


The GOP's plan to obfuscate and obstruct and then blame the president is in plain view.  Whatever pain we as a country may suffer if the trigger is pulled, we can thank the people who would rather be loyal to party purity than to the American people.

And remember this:  The Republicans gave an oath to the man whose plan is to reduce the size of government in order to drown it in a bathtub.  Their goal is to destroy government and take the country into the wilderness, then blame the government for failing in its responsibilities to the American people.

We are a nation of 300 million people who are interdependent in our common well being.  Destroying the government in the way the GOP extremists hope to destroy it will  bring catastrophe to all of us.

We have met the enemy, and they are us!