Sequestration is upon us. Congress has failed to prevent massive federal spending cuts, which is only the latest in its continued efforts to prove a troop of baboons would be more capable of serving as members of the U.S. government.
The American people seem to be oddly okay with cuts across the board to federal jobs, educational funding and much more. According to a poll done for ABC News and cited in a March 6 article, 61 percent of respondents were in favor of broad cuts to federal spending.
But 60 percent of those who responded to the same ABC poll were against cuts to the military budget. This makes sense: Sequester-related cuts to the budget of the Department of Defense could have a major negative impact on the nation’s safety and security.
So while the GOP gets the budget cuts it wanted in the worst way possible, the American people have apparently decided to join the GOP in their crusade against government spending, while at the same time our defense budget is being slashed in a way that is anything but beneficial to the goal of national safety.
Somewhere between dramatic self-imposed cuts and the farce that is Congress, there is a place where the country’s ballooning debt and financial problems can be resolved. As brutal and ham-fisted as it was, at least the sequester got the ball rolling. The key is to take control of the ball before the plot of “Red Dawn” becomes reality.
Between the extremes of the sequester and nothing, there is something. What that is, I have no idea. Finding the answer is the job of Congress, and unless they can find a real solution, the government’s ability to function is going to take an even steeper dive.
Some might cheer the forced cuts required by the sequester because, on the surface, it definitely reduces government spending, and, by extension, the reach of the government itself. But those people seem to forget bureaucracy is a lumbering creature; it trundles forward based on the momentum of its own existence. And it takes that lumbering, bloated behemoth to keep this country running, as poorly as it appears to function sometimes.
Without curtailing the power of that bureaucracy, the action of cutting its funding always cripples the government as a whole. Which, in a few decades, could be a problem.
Hopefully solving this crisis won’t take that long. Hopefully Congress can find a middle ground between the extremes and work together to keep the government from completely falling apart at the expense of the American people. I have mixed feelings about that, though, because I’m pretty sure both sides of Congress cooperating is a sign of the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.