Wonkbook: Can sequestration be stopped? (Washington Post)

About a month ago I had car trouble, losing my car for a few days thanks to some lingering issues flaring up when the weather got incredibly cold. I was coming off of winter break, so I hadn’t been paid for a few weeks, and I wasn’t exactly flush with cash. We keep a reserve fund in the family for when unexpected things like this come up, so I was covered, but if I hadn’t had the money it would have been very difficult for me to come up with it. I couldn’t have expected the college to pay me if I couldn’t get there to teach, I live too far away from campus to make taxi fare feasible, and I’m not even sure there’s bus service anywhere near my house these days. Maybe I could have figured out a combination of short taxi rides and bus fares for those first weeks while I was waiting to get paid, but more than likely I would have needed a loan to cover the repairs my car needed; I’m guessing it probably would have been the most economically feasible solution, costing me less in the long run.

This is the crippling flaw in the argument that so many conservatives put out there that the federal government, or state or local governments, should have laws on the books requiring them to balance their budgets every year because individuals are required to balance their own budgets. They aren’t. A balanced budget is an ideal to shoot for, but reality often precludes any possibility of even reaching the ideal. Emergencies happen, whether we’re talking about a person needing money to pay for car repairs or emergency medical care, or a government needing money to pay for disaster recovery or job-creating efforts at a time of high unemployment. This is why loans exist, and although they should never be relied on to take care of everything (such as when people perpetually pay off one credit card bill with another), circumstances arise where the only logical action is to borrow money in order to make sure you can keep making money, instead of plummeting into a cycle of disaster where problems fuel one another until a person, or a nation, eventually becomes powerless.

Similarly, the sequestration process is one of the stupidest political inventions of recent memory. No one is saying that running long-term deficits is a smart political move, but just like people sometimes need to borrow money to pay for unexpected medical expenses or car repairs, the federal government sometimes needs to borrow money to pay for things like helping communities rebuild from disasters and getting people back to work in a recession, because that short-term spending helps make the country as a whole more productive more quickly than would otherwise be the case. Despite the improvements in our economy over the past four years, no one would dare to say that the United States economy is anywhere close to being healthy. If the stagflation of the 1970s somehow proved that Keynesian economics don’t work, as so many conservatives claim (and I’ve never seen strong evidence to back that claim), then we have now had over thirty years of evidence that supply-side economics only benefit the super-rich and cause the incomes of everyone else to stagnate. We have seen how the austerity programmes in European countries have crippled their recoveries from the 2008 economic crash, while Iceland — who actually jailed the bankers instead of bailing them out at the citizenry’s expense — has seen a much more robust recovery.

Conservatives’ laser-like focus on deficit reduction at a time of slow economic recovery is like a father watching his child slice his leg open climbing over a chain-link fence, then standing there and yelling at the child to play more carefully instead of calling an ambulance while the child bleeds to death. America does need to reduce its deficits, but this is the worst possible time to make deficit reduction a priority, and the sequestration process does precisely that by forcing the government into spending reductions when the wisest course of action is to continue spending, not just so the least fortunate among us can continue to have roofs over their heads and food on their plates, but also so we can get more people back to work and get the American economic engine running faster and producing more money to pay off our debts. The sequestration process makes such efforts all but impossible.

There’s been a lot of debate over whose idea the sequester was, and who voted for it, but the bottom line is that America was basically forced into it by the Republican party. Energized by their strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans played a huge game of chicken with the debt ceiling, forcing Democrats into this process in order to keep the country able to pay off the debts it had already incurred. Had the United States been forced to default on its loan obligations, we would have likely seen a worldwide economic meltdown that would have made the 2008 crisis pale by comparison, and keep in mind that we are due to hit the debt ceiling again in just a few short months. Leading Republicans in Washington have already indicated that they’re willing to play this brinksmanship again, just as they are doing now with the sequester.

I’ve been accused of being a huge drama queen before, and there have been times in my life where that would have been a painfully accurate statement, moving from self-induced crisis to self-induced crisis and making everyone around me miserable. I’d like to think that I’ve gotten better at that, although some may beg to differ. When it comes to creating problems and causing those around me to suffer because of them, though, nothing I have ever done in my life comes close to what Republicans have done since the 2010 midterms, forcing the country into these huge showdowns over spending on what is now a bimonthly basis. We had the huge debate over the expiration of the Bush 43 tax cuts at the start of the year, we’re having all this hubbub over the sequester now, and the debt ceiling comes up again around May. It’s almost like Republicans are programming some kind of sick storyline for people who watch the news, with a new crisis to fend off every couple of months. The fact that we keep punting on these problems, deflecting them for a few months instead of coming up with long-term solutions, only increases my suspicion that this is the Republicans’ true game.

Never mind that the reason we have these huge deficits is because Republicans of the Bush 43 era pushed us into two costly wars, and the mounting evidence that we were deliberately lied into one of them. Never mind that Bush 43 then became the first president ever to cut taxes at a time of war. Never mind that Republicans consistently voted to raise the debt ceiling year after year while Bush 43 was president, even as they passed lots of legislation that was never paid for by the spending cuts Republicans are now demanding every government expense of the Obama presidency — even relief for Sandy victims — be “balanced” with. Never mind that deficits have been getting smaller every year Obama has been president. Never mind that in my lifetime Republican presidents have always increased the national debt, in percentage terms, much more than Democratic presidents. Never mind that the number of government jobs has gone down in this recession when they went up under the recessions of Bush 43, Bush 41, and even Saint Reagan of Conservia himself. Obviously it couldn’t be Republicans who caused that huge debt. It must be those no-good liberals giving money to able-bodied minorities who are too lazy to work, right?

Ronald Reagan’s soundbite about how “government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem” has been proven true, and it’s been proven true by Republicans making it true. I’m no fan of the Democratic party, primarily because they’re a very close second to Republicans in terms of putting their own self-interest ahead of serving the people who elected them to office in the first place, but at least Democrats don’t deliberately cripple agencies they don’t want to exist, and they don’t hijack the national and world economies to use as bargaining chips for getting the policies they want. Even after the blowback Republicans got in the 2012 election, they are still governing as if they are the only ones who should have any say in how America works and how Americans go about their lives, not just economically but personally as well. Witness the attempts by Republicans in states like Mississippi and North Dakota to create burdensome regulations to effectively ban abortion in their states. Republicans are the ones who want to slash burdensome government regulations. Sure they are.

During the Republican Revolution of the 1990s, Republicans passed legislation that ended lifetime Secret Service protection for former presidents and their spouses, capping that protection at ten years after the president leaves office. I’m guessing they were just trying to save a few bucks despite the problems that could cause, as usual. Bush 43 was going to be the first president who would lose that protection eventually, but Congress recently reinstated the lifetime Secret Service protection. Likewise, Congress could just as easily cancel the sequestration process altogether. This whole Republican-manufactured crisis could be over tomorrow — well, not tomorrow since Congress thinks it’s more important to keep their recess than solve this huge honking problem, but it could be over next week — by simply abolishing the whole sequestration process. That won’t happen, though, because Republicans can use it not just to force social spending cuts they wouldn’t be caught dead actually voting for, but so they can continue to perpetuate the image that Republicans are responsible fiscal stewards and Democrats just want to throw taxpayer money at their friends, despite the avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

If this series of self-induced national economic crises is the Republican party’s version of Must See TV, then I’d rather watch the 24-hour Kardashian Channel. (It’s coming. You know it is.) At least their drama doesn’t cause disadvantaged people to go hungry or lose their homes.