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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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