I agree with you kabar. But the Sequester does nothing to address Entitlement spending, which you and agree is the largest driver of our deficits. Both earned and unearned Entitlement spending must be dealt with.
Food stamp spending alone in 2012 alone is projected to be $85 Billion - more than enough to pay for all of the Sequester cuts in this fiscal year alone.
The current Sequester suicide plan is madness - it does nothing to stop the Entitlement bleeding, it punishes Defense, and it will cause great harm to the economy.
Simpson-Bowles did nothing to address health care spending. It was the reason that Ryan did not sign off on it.
Yes, entitlement spending must be dealt with. It is the biggest driver of our debt and it is on automatic pilot. I won't make the distinction between earned and unearned entitlement programs. They are both wealth redistribution schemes that we can't afford. You must either cut benefits or raise taxes or some combination thereof to make them sustainable.
The current Sequester suicide plan is madness - it does nothing to stop the Entitlement bleeding, it punishes Defense, and it will cause great harm to the economy.
It will no doubt harm defense, but I am upset with how politicized the military has become in this political fight. The idea that we can't deploy a carrier because of sequestration is nonsense. And I have no doubt that defense will be cut further as we get involved in the "Guns versus butter" battle that characterizes nations in decline.
I think the impact of sequestration is overblown. If reducing government spending by what amounts to a rounding error is so painful, how can we really make the spending reductions we need? We spend $10 billion a day (and borrow $4 billion of that) so sequestration is less than nine days of spending. There is no painless way out of our problem and the longer we delay confronting it, the more painful the solution will be. Sequestration is not madness. The status quo is madness as we run trillion dollar annual deficits.