Chicken Little

By: Charles Webb

 

As of this writing, there is no doubt that the automatic federal spending cuts, known as the sequester, will take effect on Friday March 1^st. You'd be hard pressed to miss the news coverage surrounding this deadline and the impending doom that it will bring about. Once the "meat cleaver" cuts "painfully and indiscriminately" into the various programs, teachers, firemen, the police and other first responders are going to be fired in mass. Our aircraft carriers will no longer be able to project our power abroad and will immediately be recalled to port. There will be no air travel for the lack of air traffic controllers. The next life-saving drug will not be discovered. Prisons will be emptied. GDP will fall precipitously throwing our weak recovery into another recession worse than the last one we came out of (although tax increases have no impact). Brace yourself. The end is near.

Satire usually doesn't translate well into writing. So in case you missed it, there was plenty of it in the previous paragraph. But if you listen to the comments coming from those who like to spend our taxes and borrow on our behalf or recipeints of those dollars, no truer words have been spoken than the above.

This is, of course, the biggest bunch of nonsense to come out of Washington in a very long time. The "draconian" cuts simply don't mathematically come close to matching the rhetoric being thrown about. This is bad politics at its worst. Let's go over some of the numbers.

$2,468,000,000,000 - Revenues 2012 (estimate)
$3,795,000,000,000 - Spending 2012 (estimate)
$1,327,000,000,000 - Deficit 2012 (estimate)
$44,000,000,000 - Sequester driven spending cuts (2013)

Let's drop 8 zeros and look at this using recognizable numbers.

$24,680 - Annual income
$37,950 - Annual spending
$13,270 - Debt incurred (this year)
$440 - proposed spending cut

So cutting back $440 on total spending of $37,950 represents a 1.16% spending decrease. That's a joke. Even after the spending cuts take place, the government will spend roughly $15 billion more than it did last year. Granted, the government works in big numbers so 1.16% looks like a lot when you assign a dollar amount to it (read that as scare tactics). But it's insulting to have us believe the government can't find barely over one percentage point worth of waste, fraud or ineffectiveness to cut.

The truly scary part of all this is the stink that's being raised over such a small step towards fiscal sanity. It makes you wonder how Washington will ever get its house in order.

The sky isn't falling.