Taking a meat ax to government as we know it
Five myths about the sequester
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, WashPost, Published: February 28
Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are the authors of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”
Our political system was not designed to be efficient, but it wasn’t supposed to be self-destructive, either. After a near-default on the public debt and a fiscal cliff that threatened a new recession, we are facing another man-made crisis: the sequester, across-the-board cuts in discretionary domestic and defense spending that are set to begin Friday and extend over a decade. Let’s separate fact from fiction about the sequester and its impact.
1. Blame Obama — the sequester was his White House’s idea.
Identifying the origins of the sequester has become a major Washington fight. Bob Woodward weighed in recently with a Washington Post op-ed making the case that the idea began in the White House. He’s right in a narrow sense, mainly because he focuses on the middle of the 2011 negotiations between Obama and Republican lawmakers. If you look before and after, a different picture emerges.
In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts. After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. If the supercommittee didn’t broker a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade — the sequester — would go into effect. The sequester was designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it.
(More here.)
Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are the authors of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”
Our political system was not designed to be efficient, but it wasn’t supposed to be self-destructive, either. After a near-default on the public debt and a fiscal cliff that threatened a new recession, we are facing another man-made crisis: the sequester, across-the-board cuts in discretionary domestic and defense spending that are set to begin Friday and extend over a decade. Let’s separate fact from fiction about the sequester and its impact.
1. Blame Obama — the sequester was his White House’s idea.
Identifying the origins of the sequester has become a major Washington fight. Bob Woodward weighed in recently with a Washington Post op-ed making the case that the idea began in the White House. He’s right in a narrow sense, mainly because he focuses on the middle of the 2011 negotiations between Obama and Republican lawmakers. If you look before and after, a different picture emerges.
In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts. After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. If the supercommittee didn’t broker a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade — the sequester — would go into effect. The sequester was designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it.
(More here.)
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2 Comments:
The authors have offered something rarely opined --- rational evaluation.
Let’s look at some of the points
#1. If the question is of the recent origins of the sequester, then shouldn’t it be traced back to the House Republican-approved “Cut Cap and Balance” legislation since sequester was the mechanism that they used to force cuts ?
#2. The cuts will result in program delays… and the “user fees” is an interesting subject … consider the “user fee” that medical device and drug companies pay for FDA approval … they will still pay the same fee, but devices and drugs will take longer to be approved … and cuts will be made in personnel … the personnel will be the “newer” employees - the ones that are not set in their ways. How many people will die because we delayed these programs ? How much will our healthcare costs rise because we delayed approval … and if we eliminate approval, how many will die with defective products.
Another cut will be for auditors looking for fraud … the recovery dollars will be lost.
#3. Hmmm … 2.3% … where has that number been used before … oh, yeah … the 2.3% “job-killing” Medical Device EXCISE Tax … so that was “job-killing” but a 2.3% reduction in government services will not kill jobs ? BTW - Congress overwhelming voted to increase the “user fee” for FDA services and never considered that to be a job-killer … but this excise tax that surveys show is largely being passed onto users (which is what was expected) and only 11.1% of medical device companies are considering reducing employment -- IMO, once they see that their competitors are raising prices, they will follow.
#4. Agreed … actually, it is not that cuts are being made but they are made indiscriminately.
#5. Agreed … remember that the House took a voted on Simpson-Bowles last spring and only 38 Members (22D 16R) voted for it.
It is taking a paring knife to a government as the left side of the aisle wants it and their reaction is like a spoiled child that does not get waht they want.
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