How
do you gauge the impact of depriving 12,000 low-income California preschoolers
of the opportunity to participate in the Head Start program because of budgetary gridlock?
Or stripping more
than half a million people living in poverty of their access to the
highly effective Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and
Children?
Even
if it’s short-lived, assessing sequestration’s toll may take years. In some
cases, lives will change course. Depriving underprivileged kids of the programs
that help give them what President Barack Obama likes to call “a fair shot”
doesn’t serve the national interest or make any sense.
Wait.
What recovery?
Good
question. While the Great Recession officially ended nearly four years ago, the post-recession
recovery never amounted to more than a myth for most Americans. Most of us
don’t just feel poorer now. We are poorer. Median household income stood at $50,000 in 2011, a nearly 9
percent decline from 1999.
This
is why many progressives asserted in the final months of last year that
starting 2013 without a fiscal deal would have meant tripping into a ditch, not
tumbling off a cliff. It doesn’t, however, mean there’s no further to sink.
Consider
the performance of that unsung but illustrative economic indicator of poor and
working class America: Walmart. Even in good times, its sales spike twice a
month when most workers get their paychecks. The retail behemoth’s same-store
sales rose an anemic 1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 from a year
earlier, as the U.S. economy overall stayed just about flat.
That
was apparently a booming business compared to what Walmart experienced in
February in the wake of the payroll tax cut’s expiration. “Sales are a total
disaster,” lamented Jerry Murray, Walmart’s vice president of finance and
logistics, in a Feb. 12 leaked email obtained by Bloomberg News. Early February marked “the worst start to a
month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”
Sequestration
may further sap Walmart’s sales and its cash-strapped customers. But it may
have a bright side if it ultimately helps Washington discover that trimming the
Pentagon budget won’t make us less safe.
The
automatic cuts now being phased in will trim military spending by $45 billion
this year. That may sound scary, but it’s merely a return to the lofty levels
reached in 2007, when the Bush administration tried to see if a “surge” would
bring peace to Iraq. It didn’t.
The
clearest evidence of this newfound military austerity came on the eve of the
sequestration’s dawn, when the Navy canceled plans to dispatch a second aircraft
carrier to the Persian Gulf.
Depending
on how you measure it, the United States spends as little as half a trillion
bucks on our military and as much as $930 million every year. This is much more firepower than we need for
any legitimate “defense” mission. But there seems to be very little political
will in Washington amid all this fiscal angst to do anything about it.
The
Pentagon budget doesn’t get much attention, not even during heated elections
like the ones we experienced last year. In Washington, military spending cuts
rarely figure prominently as a deficit-shrinking solution in polite
conversation. The fear of being “soft” on defense seems to render candidates
helpless to do anything about our oversized military budget.
Ideally,
sequestration will help our leaders see that this great nation isn’t
broke. Overspending on the
armed forces just creates that illusion.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor
of OtherWords,
a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy
Studies. OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org