The Budget Chainsaw Horror Show
By Mitch Berg
I got this via email today from a regular correspondent who works for a state agency; I’ll add emphasis to the key parts:
“A friend of mine at [another state agency] told me about the hype and reality of his situation.”
“The national association to which the state agency is affiliated with has sent out a series of communications intended to raise anxiety about sequestration. The national association declares that almost 1 million vulnerable Americans will lose their health care services due to sequestration. The actual effect on my friend’s local agency is that their federal financial allocation will drop by 4%. This drop is after increases totaling almost one third more in 2013 compared to 2008. The actual amount of the sequestration cut can be absorbed by cutting the local agency’s travel budget by about 40%. The largest cuts at the national level will be to reduce the expansion of the program, not cuts to existing clients.”
Guesstimating the net effect in federal dollars on this state agency; a 4% reduction in aid that’s risen 33-odd% in four years takes the agency back to, er, August of 2012.
Once upon a time P. J. O’Rourke said that this sort of budgeting – “Baseline Budgeting”, where all increases and decreases are relative to the previous budget – allows both sides to look at a budget that reduces an increase, claim simultaneously that the budget increases spending and cuts spending, and both be telling the truth and lying.
Anyone who “survived” the 2011 “government shutdown” recognizes this sort of ofay alarmism.
Hopefully a majority of the rest of the country does, too.
March 1st, 2013 at 6:46 am
Unfortunately, I don’t think that they do.
March 1st, 2013 at 9:51 am
I had the good fortune to hire Scott Rasmussen to address a group of our clients last Monday night. Very interesting, and I’m still parsing my notes, but one of the things that stuck out was that the Administration, and Washington in general, are terrified that no one cares about sequestration: “Their greatest fear is, ‘what if we cut spending and nobody notices? Then what do we do?'” I believe the context of his remarks is that people aren’t ignorant about sequestration, but that they just don’t care anymore. We’ve had too many financial crises and there’s greater and greater disconnect between people and their political leaders in both parties; people are checking out, leaving the parties to smaller and smaller groups of partisans that are running things. He also said, “If you remember one thing from what I say tonight, it’s that politicians never lead change.” Politicians are always at the end of the line playing catch up to public opinion (my observation: like multi-millionaires Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer trying to affect solidarity with the Occupiers).
March 1st, 2013 at 10:15 am
Q. How can you lose money on an investment when you borrow your capital at 0%?
A. When your return is -0.2%
March 1st, 2013 at 1:31 pm
The Obama Administration apology team–sorry, I mean the mainstream media–have painted the Sequester as being just shy of a collision with a monster asteroid in terms of the ensuing chaos, ignoring again the fact that it is not a “cut” at all, merely a reduction in rate of spending increases. It reminds me of trying to negotiate with an opiate addict who is constantly increasing use. So, rather than allowing the addict to increase his Vicodin intake from 240 pills a month to 270, we “compromise” and give him 255. See where this is going?
March 1st, 2013 at 2:50 pm
Re sequestration, George Will George wrote:
The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering.
Will is an opinion writer. He is not held to same standard of truthiness as the rest of us, so let me translate his words into FACT:
The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall what their constituencies believe is intolerable suffering.
Cut the take home pay of every worker who makes less than 103,000/yr by a little more than 2%, as the last ‘fiscal cliff’ deal did — no problem! Cut the money politicians can spend on their crinies and the non-wage-earning population by the same amount and . . . CRISIS DIAL IS AT ELEVEN!
March 1st, 2013 at 7:26 pm
I bet if “they” defunded the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) checks (which are required for all firearms purchases from dealers) they’d get the attention of one special interest group.
Granted, purchases must be allowed after a certain period of time if the checks are unable to be completed (after three business days excluding Sat., Sun., day of application, and holidays), but that would pretty much turn gunshows into order-wait-pickup Tupperware parties until funding was restored.
March 2nd, 2013 at 7:52 pm
The “sequester” cuts amount to less than 10% of the deficit. Even if we only hoped to reduce the deficit by half, which is really not good enough, and even if we split that deficit reduction equally between budget cuts and tax increases it would still require cuts larger than this “sequester”. Depending on how the wind is blowing, one party and then the other will have the upper hand and force their preference, but both will happen. Or we can get serious about addressing the cost of healthcare.
The real story here is that this country is unable to achieve a consensus for any budget cut at all. The last contrived crisis, the “fiscal cliff” resulted in a significant, albeit insufficient, tax increase. The sequester was supposed to be the budget-cutting complement to that deal but it is apparently politically impossible. All signs still point to inflation as the only way out.