The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today?

Most of
the current Sequester discussion concerns who owns it, not what Congress should
do to solve yet another manufactured fiscal crisis.

Republicans
say Mr. Obama owns the Sequester. Democrats say Republicans voted for it too. The
Sequester was part of the 2011 Budget Control Act. In the House, votes were:
174 Republicans for it to 66 against. Democrats were split, 95-95. In the
Senate, 28 Republicans voted for it to 19 against, while D’s supported it 45-6.

You don’t care if it is Obama’s Sequester or Boehner’s Sequester. You want them
to come to an agreement.

OMG! Is
the sky falling?

If the
Sequester is activated on March 1, 2013, will our government disintegrate?

The Obama
administration, many pundits and some Republicans are warning of mass
government layoffs and services collapsing when “Sequestration”
begins in a few days, unless our gridlocked government finds a way to
circumvent the start of the $85 billion in federal budget cuts (of a $3.6
trillion budget).

Get a grip, that’s only 2.6% of the budget, folks.

Also, the
full force of the $85 billion of cuts will
take several months to be felt, said White House budget office
controller Danny Werfel:

Under the
law, retirees are shielded, so Social Security checks will arrive on schedule
at the beginning of March and every month thereafter. Similarly, the elderly
and the disabled will not see Medicare healthcare curtailed at all over the
seven months.

Every US soldier
will get paid and the Defense Department will be allowed to shift funds to
ensure that combat operations and “critical military readiness
capabilities” are not degraded, according to the Obama administration.

The
Wrongologist wrote
last fall that the Sequester would not throw us into recession:

What
are the politics?

Republicans have decided that the Sequester,
rather than the government-funding bill due at the end of March is where
they’ll make their stand on spending cuts, The
Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports:

So, a year which
began with multiple “trigger points” for a Republican-generated meltdown—the
debt limit, the Sequester and the continuing resolution—we are down to just the
Sequester.

GOP leaders see the Sequester
as the political inverse of the fiscal cliff. Republicans felt they had little
choice at the end of 2012 but to agree to tax increases because if they did not
compromise, all of the Bush-era tax rates would have expired.

While Republicans
want to avoid cuts to military spending, the thinking is that Democrats are
more eager to spare social programs from across-the-board reductions. 

Where’s
Obama?

So far, he is holding
fast to a “no negotiating without tax increases” position.

According to Bloomberg
and their national poll conducted on Feb. 15-18, Mr. Obama enters the Sequester
showdown with his highest job approval rating in three years and public support
for his economic message, while his Republican opponents’ popularity stand at a
record low.

55% of Americans
approve of Obama’s performance in office, his strongest level of support since
September 2009 while only 35% of the country has a favorable view of the Republican
Party, its lowest rating in this survey that began in September 2009. The Republican
party has slipped six percentage points in the last six months, the poll shows.

Some Democrats
are worried that Republicans will move a bill to simply restore the Defense
spending, putting the Democrats in a tough spot. That way, the argument goes,
the Republicans could either restore the Defense cuts, or blame Democrats and
the president for it, and in either case, still blame the economic stress
resulting from the domestic cuts on the president and the Democrats.

But, if Republicans had the votes to pass a bill that averts cuts in
defense, they would already have voted on that. The reason they didn’t is either they do not have the
votes or know that the politics of dropping just the defense part of the Sequester
is bad for them.

Where’s
Boehner?

Mr.
Boehner painted Mr. Obama with the blame brush for the Sequester on Wednesday in
the Wall
Street Journal:

Is Mr.
Boehner against the Sequester? Sounds like it. He also comments on the Fiscal
Cliff deal:

Wow! This
sounds like a guy who has no intention of compromise.

But, in the
right-leaning Washington Examiner, Byron
York wonders if Mr. Boehner’s WSJ article delivers the wrong message:

Last week, Boehner
told the Associated
Press that the Sequester was a disaster that would present him and his
members with nothing but bleak options if it went into effect. He must know that
the Sequester is a political loser that won’t get the Republicans any leverage.
So why is he playing along?

Politico had a piece
on January 13th that indicated that GOP officials said more than
half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to the dramatic
cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes.

They quote an unnamed
GOP leadership adviser:

It seems like Speaker
Boehner will let the Sequester kick in for “member-management” purposes. So, Boehner
points a gun to his own head and says:

“Be
careful! When I blow my brains out, you Democrats are gonna get blood all over
your shirt!”