Post-Sequester

The safe assumption is that the sequester will happen March 1st. Even if Speaker Boehner were inclined to accede to more tax hikes, his rank-and-file would bludgeon him with his own gavel were he to even suggest it.

It is not like it matters anyway. Far from engaging leaders of Congress as is necessary, the president is running around the country attempting to politically shame Republicans into bending to his will again. The campaigning never ends and the governing never begins.

Yes, the sequester will happen, and when it does the president and his friends may come to regret their predictions of cataclysm. For a country that runs annual deficits north of a trillion dollars with over $16 trillion in debt, the sequester is but a drop in the bucket. Those it will touch are in the Beltway. For those of us outside the Beltway the sun will rise the next day and life will go forward unchanged.

Having proven to be a false prophet of doom once, how credible will the president then be when he beats his breast and gnashes his teeth over the next looming budgetary crisis -- contrived budgetary crises being his preferred method of (demagogically) operating? What will be left for him to stand on when there is a precedent that government spending can indeed be cut without entailing a national disaster?

Post-sequester disaster is not what has to worry the president. Post-sequester normalcy should. If government can be cut without the sky falling down on us all the president will be shown to have no clothes.

The Sequester

The looming sequester threatens to hoist the president by two of his own petards.

As Republicans are all too happy to remind him, he proposed the sequester during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations. Assured that Republicans would never be able to swallow defense cuts, he was undoubtedly convinced that the impending threat of them would give him leverage in future budget/spending battles with Congress.

The $1.2 trillion in cuts also provide a ready-made rebuttal to his own counter-proposal of cuts mixed with tax increases. He has always called for a "balanced" approach to deficit reduction. Taxes were raised by hundreds of billions of dollars -- with no attendant spending reductions -- to avoid the fiscal cliff. Proportionality then dictates that the revenue hikes from last time be balanced with expenditure reduction this time.