The great victims of this sequester will be our children,
the unemployed, the poor and the elderly — all groups with feeble lobbies or no
lobbies at all.
I knew that Congress
would come to its senses eventually, that it would realize that the ham-handed
budget cuts ordered by the so-called “sequester” weren’t going to work, that
some government functions were too important to be cut.
And I was right, kind
of.
Last week it restored
funds to the Federal Aviation Administration. There had been big lines and
flight delays at airports around the country, you see, and we can’t have that.
Congresspersons have to get back to their districts every Friday so they can beg for money and corporate executives have to get to their appointments on time so they’ll have the money to pay off the beggars. It’s called politics.
The way things were
going at airports, however, was beyond inconvenient; it was a national crisis.
Why, it was probably harming the war effort. I don’t know which war— terror, drugs, Afghanistan — pick one.
Why, it was probably harming the war effort. I don’t know which war— terror, drugs, Afghanistan — pick one.
So, in a heart-warming
example of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats joined hands to get the
FAA back up to strength and the Republic was saved.
Republicans, of
course, could not resist using the occasion to take a whack at President Barack
Obama.
“Why is President
Obama unnecessarily delaying your flight?” tweeted House majority leader Eric
Cantor. (Republicans are shameless in blaming Obama for things that are their
fault.)
In truth, the
Republicans foisted the farce of this sequester on the nation in 2011. That was
when they demanded it in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, which
is nothing more than agreeing to pay the bills they’d already run up. The law
further requires that agencies, the FAA included, cut all their programs
equally on a percentage basis, making it impossible to move funds from
nonessential functions to essential. That would be too sensible.
The idea was that this
arrangement was such a monumentally stupid idea and would be so harmful to the
economy that the parties would be forced to compromise on a real budget.
That badly
underestimated the monumental stupidity of the conservatives in Congress. They
decided that we didn’t need a real budget since we don’t need government
anyway, so the sequester was just fine as it was. And they allowed the cuts to
go forward.
Until they caved on
air traffic. That’s undoubtedly a precursor to further cherry-picking among
government programs. You can count on the well-lobbied programs getting
exceptions. (The Agriculture Department has already gotten money to stay the
furloughs of meat inspectors.)
It stinks.
The great victims of
this sequester will be our children, the unemployed, the poor and the elderly —
all groups with feeble lobbies or no lobbies at all.
The government had to
cut housing vouchers to 140,000 low-income families, people already on the cusp
of homelessness. Seventy thousand preschoolers are going to be turned away from
Head Start programs. Unemployment benefits, the only thing standing between the
families of millions of jobless workers and hunger, are being cut 11 percent. A
program that provides free school breakfasts, sometimes the only decent meal
poor kids get on a given day, is being cut by $25 million.
My city of Ann Arbor
is a high-tax Granola liberal place that’s proud of its superb schools. And our
local officials considered doing away with 10 or more of
the reading specialists in the lower grades before working cuts
that would drop 80 other staff members into the latest budget proposal.
All in the name of
deficit reduction.
The sequester is the
economic equivalent of the Iraq War: a self-mutilating blunder undertaken for
ideological reasons, rather than any that make sense.
The idea of improving
the economy during a recession by cutting the budget harkens back to the days
of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. It didn’t work then; it doesn’t work
now.
If you don’t believe
me, ask the European nations that have been trying to deal with their punk
economies by enforcing austerity measures on its Euro zone members with dismal
results.
Did I mention that
this stinks? It really does.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org
