SALON

Friday, Feb 22, 2013 5:38 PM UTC

Kill the sequester!

A growing chorus agrees: Don't just replace the looming raft of cuts, undo it entirely

By

Topics: Sequestration, Federal Deficit, spending, Budget, Paul Krugman, Barack Obama, U.S. Congress,

Kill the sequester!Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman (Credit: Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)

As Washington slouches toward another seemingly intractable and entirely artificial budget crisis it created for itself, there is a growing chorus proposing a very obvious conclusion: The sequester must die.

If Congress doesn’t act in the next week, automatic across-the-board 5-13 percent spending cuts will make the food system less safe, set back scientific research for a generation, and kick poor kids out of school, homeless people out of shelters, and firefighters off their trucks. Not to mention what sequestration will do to jobs, the economy, national security and adorable zoo animals. The hype is real. It is bad. At least 5-13 percent of the sky is falling.

And the worst part about it is that sequestration won’t even do much to fix the deficit, which is its entire purpose. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the long-term impact is negligible to minimal. “Sure, there’s a delay in how fast the debt rises as compared to GDP, but virtually no change to the trajectory,” Business Insider’s Walter Hickey noted. Even Fix the Debt, the single-minded campaign to lower deficits that has no problem slashing Medicare to do it, says the sequester is mostly useless in solving the debt problem.

Republicans and Democrats are arguing over competing, less painful, more effective replacements for the sequester, but they are almost certain to run out of time. “The fact of the matter is there is, unfortunately, no like ‘save the day!’ behind-the-scenes plan happening,” a Senate aide lamented.

Congress has a habit of “solving” these things at the 11th hour (see the 2 a.m. New Year’s Day fiscal cliff deal), so anything’s possible, but most people in Washington think a replacement won’t be decided upon until after sequestration is triggered, though most of the cuts will not be felt immediately.

But there is one simple solution gaining traction: Just undo the sequester and address the deficit under sane, non-emergency circumstances. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out, everybody — Democrats, Republicans, economists, deficit hawks, big government spenders — hates the sequester. So why not just kill it?

“The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing,” Paul Krugman wrote yesterday. “We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.”

The American people agree! According to a new Bloomberg poll out last night, 54 percent favor postponing the spending cuts, compared to 40 percent who say Congress should act now to get the deficit under control. “I just think we need to wait until the economy gets back on its feet before we just go in and cut without thinking,” one poll respondent said.

And a brand-new Pew poll, out today, finds that majorities of Americans oppose cutting 17 of the 18 federal programs on the chopping block that the poll asked about.

“Congress should pass a law eliminating it. Not replacing it with a bunch of other budget cuts, not engaging in a new game of chicken, not putting it off for a month or two, not having a bunch of proposals and counter-proposals, just cancelling it, period. Then once that’s done, you can start the budget process for real,” American Prospect columnist Paul Waldman wrote this week.

“Yep. There shouldn’t be any budget cuts this year,” agreed Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, saying the focus should be on long-term deficit targets, which have little to do with the cuts outlined in the sequester.

And it’s not just liberals. “If everybody agrees sequester is a mistake, instead of arguing whose idea it was, why not repeal and revert to regular budget process?” tweeted former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called for dropping the sequester last year, as well.

So why won’t this happen? Politics, naturally. Congressional aides asked about the idea said it was “pie in the sky,” and even stalwart liberals like the Congressional Progressive Caucus have settled on a plan to replace the sequester, instead of undoing it entirely.

President Obama and congressional Democrats eliminated the option of undoing the sequester last year as the election heated up, presumably in a bid to look serious on deficit reduction. And Republicans have warmed to the sequester in recent weeks, convinced that they can blame Obama for all the pain it will inflict on the economy.

Obama’s replacement proposal is vastly superior to Republicans’, but undoing the sequester and doing nothing is even better.

Alex Seitz-Wald

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 22 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
388 points389 points | 416 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills -- radical cuts destroy economies and lives, and the honest numbers and economics keep proving it
197 points198 points | 33 comments
vote
Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain wants to send women to jail who don't report their miscarriages to the police
203 points204 points | 28 comments
vote
Corporate greed is poisoning America — literally
158 points159 points | 18 comments
vote
Poll shows Bachmann trailing in 2014 reelection race: A new PPP poll shows her Dem challenger with a slight lead
30 points31 points | 5 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations