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The Heritage Foundation
Morning Bell:
Obama’s Sequester Smokescreen
By Jim DeMint
March 1, 2013 at 5:30 am(0)
Suppose you desperately needed to lose weight but had a Big Mac with
fries and a Coke staring you in the face. You could take your need to
diet seriously and say, “No thanks, I’ll have a salad.” Or you could
decide to reduce the Big Mac meal by 2 percent—pushing aside a couple
French fries and gobbling up the rest.
If you took Option B, how do you think that “diet” would work out for
you? Well, that, my friends, is the tale of the sequester that hit us
this morning.
For the past few days the White House, with a big assist from
sympathetic media, has done all within its considerable powers to make
it seem like sequestration means the end of the world. If all you’ve
heard is their side, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Mayans
were right after all—just off by a couple of months on their prediction
of the apocalypse.
This political panic needs a little common sense. In the last decade,
federal spending has exploded from a $2 trillion budget in 2002 to a
$3.5 trillion budget in 2012—a 75 percent increase. Over the next 10
years, the budget is projected to grow another 69 percent to $6
trillion. The sequester barely taps the brakes on this runaway
spending, still allowing a 67 percent increase over the next 10 years.
Too much to ask of Washington?
“Sequester” is an awkward word for automatic spending reductions that
were decided during negotiations for the 2011 debt ceiling deal, and it
is problematic. The reductions leave the largest part of federal
spending—entitlements—virtually untouched while deeply cutting into
defense priorities. This compromises national security by undermining
military readiness and capabilities, while doing nothing to make
defense more efficient and effective. This is a poor substitute for
real budgeting. The President and Congress have had a year and a half
to come up with a smarter way to reduce spending, and they have failed.
But you must remember that we live in a world where Harry Reid’s Senate
has not passed a budget in 1,402 days. The sequester is a symptom of
Washington’s fiscal cluelessness.
Yet, recall why we are having this conversation in the first place.
We’re facing a serious debt crisis that has already led to America’s
credit rating being downgraded. It is driven by these massive spending
increases—resulting in even more debt—which, if left unresolved, will
cripple our children’s future with higher interest rates, inflation,
and even fewer jobs. It’s time to put our nation on the path to a
balanced budget within the next 10 years.
Read the rest of the article at the Heritage Foundation
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