In light of the massive news coverage of the impending sequester, I have been hesitant to write a post about stuff you've probably already read. However, I thought this article from the Washington Post today was compelling, so I'll keep it short, post some quotes, and let you draw your own conclusions. Opinions, anyone?
The thesis: "In the long partisan conflict over government spending, the
sequester is where the rubber meets the road. Obama is betting Americans will
be outraged by the abrupt and substantial cuts to a wide range of government services, from law
enforcement to food safety to public schools. And he is hoping they will rise
up to demand what he calls a ‘balanced approach to deficit reduction that
replaces some cuts with higher taxes.' But if voters react with a shrug,
congressional Republicans will have won a major victory in their campaign to
shrink the size of government. Instead of cancelling the sequester, the GOP
will likely push for more."
Emily Holubowich, a Washington health-care lobbyist who leads a coalition of 3,000 nonprofit groups fighting the cuts: “The
good news is, the world doesn’t end March 2. The bad news is, the world doesn’t
end March 2... The worst-case
scenario for us is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens. And
Republicans say: See, that wasn’t so bad.”
John H. Makin, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “It
would be a big problem for the White House if the sequester came and went and
nobody really noticed anything. Then people will start saying, ‘Well, maybe we can cut
spending.'"
Richard
Kogan, a former Obama budget official now at the left-leaning Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities: “This is the Catch-22… The problem would be solved
faster if it was literally a disaster. But making it a disaster is not what
agency managers really want to do.”
Makin (of the American Enterprise Institute) again: “By summertime, if the economy gets much
weaker, then the pressure to do something starts to grow… Then the blame game
will really get exciting, because Democrats will say if Republicans hadn’t been
so awful and mean, we wouldn’t be having a recession now. And the Republicans
will all panic.”
1 comment:
The debates regarding the sequester have been, unsurprisingly, accompanied by an onslaught of finger-pointing. Another prime example of partisan America. It is unclear to me what the real goal is here: maintaining a country or making the opposite party look stupid. Anyways, the implications of the sequester are still unclear. However, this Huff Post article lays out state-by-state statistics released by the White House in regards to cuts.
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