So-called 'draconian budget cuts necessary in debt-riddled nation
The deadline for sequestration has passed — the budget cuts tied to it will now begin. According to the White House and leaders on both sides of the aisle, it’s only a matter of time before teachers are laid off, fire stations are shut down, police stop responding to distress calls and society as a whole collapses.
As you pack up the valuables you plan to bring with you on your search for safety in the post-apocalyptic anarchy that America is to become, make sure you leave some kind of note welcoming the Chinese troops that will soon be occupying the area — after all, cuts to the U.S. military will leave it completely ineffective and unable to defend us from foreign invaders.
I’ll admit that our political leaders aren’t quite predicting the end of the world, but they might as well be. In addition to layoffs to all of the sectors previously mentioned (education, police, fire departments and military) cuts in payments from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the protection offered from the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration are also forecasted.
And they’re right to a point — as the sequester goes into effect, each government agency will be forced to make cuts across the board, to the tune of $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, including approximately $84 billion by the end of this year.
Those numbers seem like a lot, but we have to keep in mind that those are $84 billion in cuts from our $4 trillion annual budget, or about 2 percent. Those scales are still mind boggling, but to put it in perspective, that’d be the equivalent of a household making $50,000 a year (the national median) cutting $1,240 over the course of a year, or about $100 a month. That’s a family of four eating at home twice a month instead of eating out.
Why, then, are politicians talking about “draconian cuts”? The main reason is what’s called the “Firemen First” principle — whenever cuts are proposed to a government budget, that government fights the cuts by applying them to the most painful areas possible. Citizens fear (or feel, depending on how long negotiations go on) these painful cuts and relent on their demands for cuts, which is what the government wanted. It’s the equivalent of that family we talked about earlier cutting $100 by forcing everyone to shower together to save on the water bill.
Even if the full force of the sequester is felt and all of those cuts go into effect, our spending for 2013 is still projected to be higher than it was in 2012.
Keeping the proportions from before, politicians talking about the sequester as the end of the world are the equivalent of a family living off $50,000 doing the same about $1,240 in cuts. I’ll agree these cuts won’t be fun, but for a family that’s $255,000 in debt (that’s $16.6 trillion for our government) it’s literally the least they can do.
—Ross Abbott, first-year business economics student
