With budget sequestration only nine days away, it looks like
lawmakers are going to hold hands, plug their noses, and take the
plunge. Washington, after years of talking about its budget
problems, will finally set aside short-term political concerns and
slash spending. At last some backbone – some gumption –
from our elected officials. Huzzah, gentlemen!
If only it were that dramatic.
Instead the politics of sequester are shaping up to be as
demoralizing as anything else in Washington. Greg Sargent, in his
usual morning dervish of GOP bashing,
got a lot right yesterday:
The Hill reports
this morning, however, that Republicans say they’re not worried
about the political impact of the sequester. They tell the
paper that they will be able to make the case to the public that
the sequester was Obama’s idea, meaning he’ll take the blame for
the damage it does. …
It’s an implicit admission that deep spending cuts are
bad politically for whichever party owns them. After all,
if this were not the case, then Republicans would not need to try
to shift the blame to Obama for the cuts that are coming. Yet
Republicans, and not Democrats, are the ones who are advocating for
replacing the sequester only with deep spending
cuts!
And these cuts aren’t actually deep. Sequestration amounts to
$1.2 trillion in shrinkage over the next nine years – or an average
of $133 billion per year. Further they aren’t even real cuts, as
Sen. Rand Paul pointed out in his State of the Union response,
since they only slow the rate of spending growth, not actual
spending. One look at
this chart by the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy shows
just how piddling the sequester really is.
And the reaction from the mighty paladins of Republicanism is:
“Please! Don’t blame us!”
Instead they’re shifting the onus to President Obama. Several
Republican congressmen have tweeted using the hashtag
“#Obamaquester,” a not-so-subtle attempt to blame the cuts on the
president. The president responded with a press conference
yesterday flanked by first responders. He called the budget cuts a
“meat cleaver approach” and assured the country that Congress could
still stop them.
It was shameless theater and Republicans are correct that Obama
should own the sequester. But still, there’s something absurd about
all this. Spending reductions are finally going to take effect and
the major players in Washington are treating them like a
hacky-sack, frantically kicking the sequester to the next person in
the circle.
To be fair, several Republicans are openly supporting
sequestration on principle. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who will have to let
one of his staffers go thanks to cuts, nevertheless declared, “The
bigger concern is what is good for the country.” Rep. Justin Amash
pushed back on the “Obamaquester” tag, noting that both Republicans
and Democrats voted for the sequester’s creation back in 2011.
And the House did pass a set of budget cuts that would have
prevented the sequester from being triggered (one that the Senate
never would have approved).
But since then the official Republican reaction has been to run
from sequestration. The House GOP’s budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan,
has taken to bashing President Obama for the sequester, even though
he previously praised it and voted for it. Ryan should be
out there explaining how sequestration doesn’t even skim the
surface of our problem. Instead he’s heading for the hills.
Despite controlling the House and leveraging the debt ceiling
deadlines, the GOP has struggled to pass budget reductions. Now we
know the circumstances under which they can: the cuts must be
mandatory, automatic, plausibly blamable on other people, and
implemented gradually over the course of a decade. Also they must
be measured against the rate of spending, meaning not real cuts at
all.
Let your chest swell with confidence. Republicans 2016: The
Ideas We Need; The Requisite, Incremental, Autopiloted, Politically
Safe, Fake Spending Cuts We Deserve (And Are All Obama’s Fault). We
can only hope the EPA hasn’t outlawed gas-guzzlers large enough to
fit that bumper sticker.
None of this bodes well for the spending battles looming in the
future. Already House and Senate appropriators are
working quietly to avoid another high-profile government
shutdown fight in March when the current stopgap budget expires.
The debt ceiling will have to be raised again in May. If
Republicans are queasy about sequestration, will they really stand
up and demand serious cuts in coming months?
And then there’s the content of the cuts. Many conservatives are
irritated about sequestration because it disproportionately targets
the military. I don’t share their frustration, but I do understand
it. The Pentagon has already accepted $487 billion in cuts over the
next ten years through spending caps. Meanwhile the most hefty and
consequential drivers of our debt – entitlements, health care
spending, and student loans — are mostly untouched by
sequestration.
The more you look at the sequester, the more trivial it seems.
And yet both sides of the aisle are running around in circles,
screaming and pointing at each other. How can anyone with this
mentality be trusted to raise the Social Security retirement age,
or turn down the higher education faucet?
So carry on with the pessimism, conservatives. Washington is
still depressingly broken. Spending cuts are still politically
repulsive. And only a handful of Republicans are seriously trying
to fix the problem.
If the country is drunk on government spending, sequestration is
a baby step towards the Brita filter. That’s it.
