Could the sequester actually be good for America?

Welcome to Sequester Week: If Congress does nothing before Friday, the federal government starts dealing in $85 billion in cuts to discretionary spending over the rest of this fiscal year, and $1.2 trillion over the next decade, roughly half of it from the Defense Department budget. To underscore, again, how unpleasant these cuts will be, President Obama on Sunday released a detailed breakdown of what programs and jobs could be cut in each state and congressional district.

Obama and congressional Democrats have a pretty unified message on the sequester: Replace it with a "balanced" package of targeted tax increases and spending cuts. Republicans, on the other hand, are divided into roughly three camps, says Ginger Gibson at Politico, and two of those either are willing to let the cuts kick in or "want the cuts to be even deeper," arguing that Obama is using "scare tactics" to make necessary cuts sound worse than they will be. Many Republican governors, gathered in Washington for the National Governors Association meeting, fall into the third camp: Fix it!

The governors are right to be nervous, says economist Jared Bernstein at his blog. "While the truth is no one knows how this is going to play out, I strongly suspect it will be rough at both macro and micro levels." On the macroeconomic level, we'll probably see half a point shaved from an already too-weak GDP and hundreds of thousands of job losses. And on the micro level, "the layoffs and furloughs I'm reading about sound real to me, and I suspect their impact will be felt by many people if this drags on for more than a few weeks" — cuts in Head Start and food stamps, defense contractors and FDA food inspectors, and "for anyone who travels a lot, like I do, the TSA and FAA furloughs are... um... worrisome." If you're heading to the airport soon, "bring a good book. A good, long book."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But there could be an upside, say Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post. "The most basic truth of modern politics is that action happens only in response to crisis," and this could be the crisis that spurs Congress into big action — and Americans into getting a grip on our fiscal plight. That could be a good thing.