Republicans and Democrats alike fell in line behind the sequester when it was proposed not because they wanted to slash their favorite appropriations but because they figured the other side would never let slashing its favorite appropriations happen so the draconian cuts would never happen. Surprise, surprise, no one blinked so now everyone is paying for Congressional obstinance.
Well, not quite everyone. While 70,000 kids are being thrown out of Head Start, millions of seniors are deprived of nutritious meals, hundreds of Federal food inspectors have been furloughed endangering the nation's food supply, and thousands of teachers, police officers and firefighters have been laid off, not one member of the House of Representatives or the Senate has seen any effect at all. In fact, the executive, legislative and judicial branches were specifically exempted from the effects of the sequester. In all fairness, it should be noted that President Obama has voluntarily reduced his salary by 10% in response to sequester cuts. No one else has rushed forward to share the pain.
In fact, while seniors go hungry, Congress and the President were so deeply moved by the impact of their own gutlessness on hapless air travelers that they loosened the rules of sequestration to allow the FAA to restore air traffic controllers and reduce air traffic delays. Oh the horror of having to wait and extra hour in order to be treated like garbage by airlines and pay for a bag of 20 stale peanuts! Let salmonella into our food chain, but don't make members of Congress and other air passengers wait another hour! What hypocrites.
A couple of days ago, in an interview with Ryan Lizza, of CNN and The New Yorker, House Majority Whip Eric Cantor acknowledged that Paul Ryan and he created the sequester by pressuring Speaker John Boehner not to accept the grand bargain upon which he and the President had agreed. Why do Cantor and Ryan like the sequester? Simple, the sequester achieves the GOP right wing's long time desire to cut Federal spending on programs that they and the Libertarian/Ayn Rand wing of the party believe to be outside of the scope of Federal authority.
Democrats naïvely believed that the threat of cuts to GOP favorites like defense and corporate subsidies would compel Republicans to avoid invoking the sequester. But the Republicans understand that there is a lot more than 10% waste in the Pentagon budget, so defense wouldn't really feel the pain despite cries to the contrary from military leadership and Obama appointed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Libertarians are not fond of outright subsidies to the private sector either, and corporate earnings are at an all time high, so the large corporate entities that are beneficiaries of governmental largesse would weather the storm. Those private sector companies that are very much dependent on the Federal government, like those working in cutting edge technologies, e.g. alternative fuel sources, are not likely to show profitability in the short run, and depriving them of their funding source will help kill them clearing the playing field for the traditional businesses that are major sources of contributions to the Republican Party.
And so the sequester continues to devastate those who are most vulnerable and those who are working in developing the technologies we will need in the decades to come, while merely annoying the rich and powerful a little bit. My conclusion? This is an example of the Republicans being evil and the Democrats being stupid. This is a hell of a government we've got here.
