Bring on the sequester! I’m with Rand Paul and Paul Ryan and my new favorite, Ted Cruz of Texas, on this one. But for different reasons.
I’m just plain intrigued to see what happens when $85 billion evaporates from an economy that’s just beginning to pick up speed. Sure, I feel sorry for all the special ed students and vets and hungry old people and nursing mothers and military families that’ll be hurt, but I’m pretty sure this massive experiment in sudden deprivation won’t directly injure me, so why should I worry? (Hey, why don’t we all think like members of Congress?)
Besides, the recent meteor incident in the Urals whetted my appetite for apocalypse. (Before moving along, let’s take a moment to wonder why meteorites seem to preferentially target Russia: One of the greatest explosions of the 20th century took place over a forest in Siberia in 1908. Is there some sort of anti-Russki bias in the Oort Cloud? Gerard Depardieu, the French actor and patriot who just became a Russian citizen to avoid taxes in his native land, might want to take note.)
Back to the looming economic disaster. I, for one, am sick and tired of the loom and ready for the crash. I’m tired of numbers, tired of the hysterical babble, tired of the faith-based economic theories of the right. (A national deficit is not like a family’s debt: Almost all the borrowed money circulates inside the country. Duh. And you know what else? The federal government ran a $3 billion surplus last month because Social Security taxes went up. When you raise taxes, more money comes in and the deficit goes down. It’s like a miracle!)
And I am so very unspeakably tired of Congress. This, I realize, is not an original sentiment—witness the Public Policy Polling poll last month that put that body’s popularity behind that of lice, colonoscopies and Genghis Khan. (The news wasn’t all bad, though. People still preferred Congress to North Korea, meth labs and Ebola.)
I realize that taking this giant step toward stopping the recovery and putting the U.S. on an economic par with stagnant, austerity-saddled Europe (oh, yay) will not make Congress go away, or behave better. But it will, I believe, substantially contribute to something that is very close to my heart: the end of the GOP as a viable political party.
It’s like this. You’ve just learned definitively that demographics—inexorable changes sweeping through a whole society—are running against you and everything you hold dear (the gun lobby, income inequality, low corporate taxes). So what do you do? You throw a wrench into the economy because your pet theory holds that good will come of starving the beast.
By doing so, you create an object lesson in how that economy actually works and what government actually does. This will be hard learning for the millions of half-educated working-class Americans who’ve been watching Fox News and listening to talk radio, believing the propaganda that’s been fed to them. But learn they will.
And this time, they’ll know who to blame—the frothing Tea Partiers they were duped into electing, and the party to which they belong. Those guys yammer about smaller government and the deficit 24/7, so guess what? They get to own the coming pain. It doesn’t matter that the White House proposed the sequester in the first place—that was nearly two years ago and we’re a short-attention-span nation.
The greatest entertainment value, of course, will not be in watching the Tea Partiers self-destruct—whatever happened to Sarah Palin, anyway?—but in seeing the GOP old guard flail. They won’t negotiate because they’re afraid of the party’s crazy fringe, yet they’re smart enough to realize that the game they’re playing is catastrophic. I know it’s bad, bad, bad to enjoy the sufferings of others, but John McCain and John Boehner have made their beds.
(And I’m utterly sick of their pretend obsession about who’s to blame for Benghazi—talk about a dead horse. And now it’s drones. The CIA uses drones to kill American al-Qaida members and the president OKs it? Fine by me. For me, “al-Qaida member” kind of cancels out “American.” Besides, assassination is better than war—it tends to kill fewer bystanders.)
Where’s a meteor strike when you need one?
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2013.
Funny that with the 85 Billion in cuts, Obama still has spent more this year than last year, I say give him all the money he can spend, why drag this on, Lets go bankrupt sooner than later, then we can get all the crooks out of office sooner
Politico’s confirming Obama’s staff’s contributing the sequester idea muddies the blame waters. Azrebelmaj and I disagree on stimulus (and “Obama spending”), but we may need a lot more of it if/when sequestration chokes this economy.
The politicians should be hung in the city square. You jest with serious issues, as did I just now. They play with their politics as they play with cards and bet against the house at our expense and stability. I do not disagree that cuts are needed and overdue. However, let’s make them in areas of unproductive efforts. Green Energy could take a back seat for a long while; funding third world toilets that have been dug into our system like ticks for years and make no effort toward liberty could all use pink slips. Maybe cutting back on a few Presidential vacations and requiring Congressman to work twenty years instead of being vested in one term for retirement might get their attention. Instead, we cut into a military already so war torn that the young men and women, with a suicide rate that is out of this world, who have served honorably can’t even pay the rent. Then the Homeland Stupidity Department, top heavy with bureaucratic lackees that know no shame. The Border is under control, seriously? Well let’s ship all those agents that are getting themselves killed regularly off on an unpaid vacation where they stand to lose 40% of their income overnight. That will make them feel like protecting us I’m sure. Wake up court jester. Rome is burning and you think it is all entertainment for your column.
Look at a map …. Russia’s BIG, and haven’t you ever heard of Meteor Crater in little old Arizona. The chances of getting hit rise with size after all. Remember Jupiter getting hit last year, or the Shoemaker-Levy comet in 1994 which also hit Jupiter?
Also, we notice more “frothing” from Tea Party haters than Tea Party supporters. You sound like another clueless left-wing fool!
Whatever happened to Sarah Palin? Michele Bachmann – the candidate for those who feel Sarah Palin is too intellectual.
How nice that you can afford to be tired and dismiss it and wait for the fallout. Leave the columns then to someone who is also tired but can’t give in because there is too much at stake. Someone who knows what the actual cuts will do, someone who knows what the actually cuts won’t do.
Here’s something the cuts are guaranteed to do: those on unemployment extensions will in April, be looking at their generous $240 a week being cut by as much as 22%. Just one thing the willfully uninformed don’t know, because they’re focused on the politics.
When is the huge, world-destroying meteor? I can’t wait. The only difference between Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” and now, is that the black president is actually smart.