By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 22, 2013
We are just days away from a cataclysm of biblical
proportions. The cuts foretold in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are young as
far as prophecies go, but apparently they are every bit as terrifying as rivers
of blood and plagues of locusts. Any day now we can expect White House
spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement:
"And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the
rate of increase in federal spending."
The great game in
Washington is who will get the blame for something both House Speaker John
Boehner and President Obama agree will be calamitous for the country. It is an
argument so idiotic it could only pass for seriousness in Washington. The
Republicans correctly note that the president proposed the sequester. In fact,
back when the president believed that Republicans were more terrified of these
automatic budget cuts than Democrats were, he pretended that he would veto any
attempts to get rid of them that didn't give him even more of the tax hikes he
holds so dear. Now that Republicans have already agreed to a tax hike, they'll
be damned if they'll raise them even more.
Fair enough. But
the GOP agreed to the idea. This wasn't some elaborate con in which John
Boehner wakes up thinking March 1 is a morning like any other, only to discover
$85 billion is missing.
The GOP will
probably lose the public relations battle over the sequester, because that's
the Republicans' job in the age of Obama. A U.S. ambassador is murdered in a
terrorist attack the administration ineptly responded to -- and blamed on a
video -- but the only real story is that Republicans are so crazy, they want to
know what happened. The president nominates a middle-brow pol to run the
Defense Department, one who must recant all of his well-known views in order to
get the job, and the story is how irrational the GOP is for caring. If the
White House dispatched a drone to circle Boehner's home, the front-page story
in The New York Times would be on the speaker's troubling paranoia.
But that doesn't
mean Republicans should make the White House's job easier. Which is why it's
good news that the House leadership is reportedly working on legislation that
would force Obama to choose where the $85 billion in cuts should come from.
Both the president and Boehner agree that the across-the-board cuts required by
the sequester make no sense when most agencies can find less painful ways to
trim a few pennies out of every dollar.
It's unlikely that
Obama will take such a deal, since he and the Democratic-controlled Senate
twice rejected legislation that replaced sequester cuts with more reasonable
ones. Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to
accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases
and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children
to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on
supermarket shelves.
And he's not crazy
for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a
billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled
increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed
to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school's Thanksgiving parade.
And that is what
galls me. If the sequester goes into effect, the federal budget for this year
will still be larger than last year's ($3.553 trillion in 2013 vs. $3.538
trillion in 2012). With the sequester in effect, federal non-defense spending
will still be 10 percent higher than it was in 2008. But Washington, led by
Obama but with GOP help, is telling the American people that unless government
gets an even bigger raise (with money borrowed from China, by the way),
civilization will unravel, 911 calls will find no purchase and Bane shall
irrevocably seize control of Gotham.
The federal
government has grown inexorably for decades. Our president casts himself a
Solomonic manager, and yet he is saying that absent a few extra pennies on
every dollar there's no way he can maintain government's core functions? A
manager in any other field of human endeavor would be fired on the spot for
making such an argument. But in Washington this passes for leadership.
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