Wow. After much dilly-dallying, delaying, and obstructionism, it looks like the Sequester might actually Go Through this week. For some reason Americans aren’t very freaked out about it; the latest theory is that “it lacks a catchy name.” Maybe it’s harder to overhype something when it doesn’t have a scary word like “cliff” in the title.
What Spending Cuts?
Not that the government isn’t trying to overhype this thing. The powers that be are threatening us with delayed flights, furloughed workers — even “a lawless society“! To hear Obama and other politicians and officials talk about these “dire,” “brutal,” “devastating,” and “painful” cuts, you would think the Sequester is chopping the budget in half!
Actually, the apocalyptic post-sequester world involves federal spending that is still bigger than last year’s, just… not as big as it would have been. Here’s one of the charts going round the Internet:
To be fair, “non-discretionary” spending (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) is rising so much these days that I think the other stuff will actually be close to 2008 levels or something with the Sequester (I can’t find that chart right now).
But the dire warnings are downright preposterous. When you look at that bar of 2013 spending, it’s not at all clear to me that the little sliver chopped off by the Sequester is where all of the air traffic controllers and fifth day of civilian defense workers go, especially since that whole sliver wasn’t even there a few years ago when we still had those things!
If we had a media that was worth something, they would ask the government what services are taking up the money that used to go to all these things they are threatening to cut – things that have always been affordable under those spending levels! But instead they just dutifully spread all the threats and then wonder why no one seems to care.
The Rand Paul Proof
OK, so maybe when you account for inflation, and population growth, and the way the sequester is mandated to work, some of that just has to happen this way, or something. I still can’t believe that all of these government budgets that have happily grown by X% for years will suddenly threaten the security of the entire nation if they go through a temporary 3% (or whatever) cut for one year.
Why not? Because I believe it’s very likely that every government budget has more than 3% waste in it! Rand Paul just returned $600,000 to the Treasury – or 17% of his annual Senate office budget – by treating it like valuable taxpayer money. So maybe you could trim Congressional budgets by a good 8-9% without even requiring anyone to be half as much of a tightwad as that radical Paul!
Why can’t these Sequester “cuts” make it harder for the Department of Homeland Security to confiscate boats when their own paperwork is incorrect or make it harder for the TSA to detain children in wheelchairs? Why can’t these Sequester “cuts” reduce any of the corrupt or fraudulent or special-interest-driven definitely-non-public-good stuff the government does? Are we really supposed to believe the cuts will only affect all the good and necessary things our government does, like helping planes takes off and giving vaccines to children?
Even If It Were True
But let’s charitably assume there is no waste in any of these programs, and that the Sequester cuts will necessarily result in a genuine and total reduction of positive services provided by the federal government.
Doesn’t that just drive home the point about how large the federal government has gotten these days? We need the federal government to keep our airplanes from running into each other, to pay our school teachers, to feed our seniors, to fund vaccines for children and give us grants to keep our local court systems running? Is there nothing that local communities or even states can handle by themselves anymore?
The hysteria coming from our leaders is completely rational; they have every incentive (is this what economists call “public choice theory”?) to fight to maintain their budget levels and to make the tiniest cuts in those budgets seem as frightening as possible. But you don’t have to fall for it. Maybe, just maybe, these “cuts” will actually happen, and they won’t be that bad, and they will actually roll back a tiny sliver of the federal government’s incredible reach into every facet of our modern society.
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