The sequester: Where’s the pain?

“Sequestageddon” is upon us, said Mark Steyn in NationalReview.com, and all across America people are struggling with the devastating consequences. Airplanes are falling from the sky! Hospitals are closing, our drinking water is “choked with fecal coliform,” and our Naval fleet is limping back to port—and all because the federal government began phasing in $85 billion of across-the-board spending cuts on March 1. What’s that you say? You haven’t noticed anything like this? That’s because President Obama’s predictions of doom turned out to be as imaginary as the Mayan apocalypse. The reality, said Joe Scarborough in The New York Times, is that the sequester cuts “a teensy-weensy sliver” from the federal government’s $3.8 trillion budget. Does Obama expect us to believe that the U.S. can’t function if it cuts “a penny out of every dollar it spends?”

It’s true that some of Obama’s predictions were “alarmist and flat-out wrong,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But many domestic programs will get a 5 percent cut, while the Pentagon’s cuts are 8 percent, and as the consequences slowly roll out, they will be painful. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be “furloughed” starting April 1, reduced to working four days a week with a 20 percent pay cut, and government contractors will lay off their own workers. In cities, funding for social services like after-school programs and Meals on Wheels will vanish, said Josh Voorhees in Slate.com, while the local economies around rural military bases will suffer as furloughed residents begin “pinching pennies.” The Food and Drug Administration will perform fewer food inspections, causing meat shortages. Transportation Security Administration agents will no longer receive overtime pay, meaning longer security lines at airports. People’s lives didn’t “change overnight” when the sequester hit—but we will feel the cuts sooner or later.

Nevertheless, most Americans greeted the sequester “with a yawn,” said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com. They’ve already survived budget cuts at work, so what’s the big deal? Voters may “hate the process and the spectacle” of sequester politics, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com. But when pollsters have asked them in the past what they’d cut to reduce the deficit, Americans “of all political persuasions” have overwhelmingly chosen defense and discretionary spending, with entitlements left untouched. So the sequester gives them “exactly what they’re asking for.”

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