Sequestration — Bring It On

I’ve been reading President Obama’s helpful guide to the things that sequestration will force the goverment to cut (the link is to the Illinois version) and I’ve realized that most of the cuts from sequestration fall into two categories:

The first category consists of cuts that would be pretty damned awesome:

• …Illinois will lose about $587,000 in Justice Assistance Grants that support law enforcement, prosecution and courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, and crime victim and witness initiatives…
• …the automatic cuts would reduce loan guarantees to small businesses by up to approximately $900 million…
• …The FBI and other law enforcement entities would see a reduction in capacity equivalent to more than 1,000 Federal agents…
• …The Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) ability to leverage private sector resources to support projects that spur local job creation would be restricted…
• …U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would not be able to maintain current staffing levels of border patrol agents and CBP officers as mandated by Congress. CBP would have to reduce its work hours by the equivalent of over 5,000 border patrol agents and the equivalent of over 2,750 CBP officers…
• …The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would reduce its frontline workforce, which would substantially increase passenger wait times at airport security checkpoints. TSA would need to initiate a hiring freeze for all transportation security officer positions in March, eliminate overtime, and furlough its 50,000 officers for up to seven days.

Intrusive busybodies, useless bureaucrats, politically connected businesses, and thugs with no respect for freedom. Fuck them all. And the Administration’s report leaves out the best part:

• …the Drug Enforcement Administration will lose $166 million from its $2.02 billion staffing and appropriations budget…
• DOD’s Drug Interdiction and Counter-Drug Activities budget of $1.6 billion will be reduced by $157 million
• DOJ’s Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement budget of $528 million will be reduced by $43 million
• The DEA Diversion Control Fee Account budget of $335 million will be reduced by $25 million
• The Office of National Drug Control Policy budget of $25 million will be reduced by $2 million
• The High-intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program budget of $239 million will be reduced by $20 million
• “Other Federal Drug Control Programs,” with a total budget of $100 million, will undergo $8 million in cuts.

Don’t think of it as budget cuts, think of it as an investment in freedom. Reading that list makes me feel like the night before Christmas.

The second category of cuts, on the other hand, consists of threats that, if allowed to happen, should be grounds for impeaching President Obama:

…Up to 1,100 disadvantaged and vulnerable children could lose access to child care, which is also essential for working parents to hold down a job…

…around 5,230 fewer children will receive vaccines for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, influenza, and Hepatitis B…

…up to 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children could go untreated…

…At the major gateway airports, average wait times could increase by 30-50 percent. At the nation’s busiest airports, like Newark, JFK, LAX, and Chicago O’Hare, peak wait times could grow to over 4 hours or more. On the southwest land border, our biggest ports of entry in California and Texas could face wait times of 5 hours or more during peak holiday weekends and travel periods…

…Title I education funds would be eliminated for more than 2,700 schools, cutting support for nearly 1.2 million disadvantaged students…

…Cuts to special education funding would eliminate Federal support for more than 7,200 teachers, aides, and other staff who provide essential instruction and support to preschool and school-aged students with disabilities…

…More than 100,000 formerly homeless people, including veterans, would be removed from their current housing and emergency shelter programs, putting them at risk of returning to the streets…

…close to 8,900 homeless persons with serious mental illness would not get the vital outreach, treatment, housing, and support they need…

The federal budget is famously bloated and wasteful. Yet when forced to trim between 1 and 2 percent of the budget (depending how you count) these are the things Obama says he would cut.

Let’s put that in perspective. At the beginning of the year, the federal government unceremoniously (and with surprisingly little debate or media coverage) increased payroll taxes by 2 percent. And all over America, millions of middle-to-low income-families — anybody with earnings below the cap, really — quietly learned to live with a 2 percent cut in the family budget.

But now when the government is asked to cut its budget by about the same percentage, they say they’ll have to cut programs that help women and children, the sick and the disabled. It’s hard to interpret this as anything other than a threat.

This whole problem came to a head originally with the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011, at which point Obama gave the Republicans everything they wanted and set up the sequestration plan in return for postponing the hard decisions until after the election. If the Democrats are right that the Republicans are holding us hostage, it’s only because the Democrats sold us out to them so they could stay in power.

Despite all this, my gut tells me that thoughtlessly imposing across-the-board cuts is a dumb idea. But you know what? We’ve been trying the dumb idea of profligate borrowing and spending since 2008 and it hasn’t done much to fix the economy. Could sequestration really be any worse than that mess? I say let’s try it and find out.