[Vision2020] Cry About the Real Wolf

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 6, 2013
Cry About the Real Wolf By CHARLES M. BLOW

The White House horribly botched its messaging on the sequester.

The Obama administration desperately wanted to define the sequester’s
immediate job casualties and calamitous disruptions.

In a way, Obama’s strategy was understandable, and may well have worked on
a different group of Republicans from the present crop, which is
constitutionally opposed to anything that this president supports.

It’s like one of those Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny argues
with Yosemite Sam and then takes Sam’s position only to have Sam continue
to disagree out of spite and anger and ignorance. In our version, Sam then
threatens to blow the economy to smithereens. It would be funny it weren’t
so tragically real.

The White House wanted to cause enough outcry that it would pressure
Republicans into a deal that would avert indiscriminate, across-the-board
cuts.

But the outcry never came. Republicans gambled that it never would. They
called the White House’s bluff.

The public had grown numb with the sky-is-falling hysterics in Washington,
so much so that few were paying close attention to the sequester. A CBS
News poll <http://www.pollingreport.com/budget.htm> issued this week found
that only 28 percent of Americans said that they were paying very close
attention.

Many Republicans played down the sequester’s potential fallout, while fact
checkers castigated the White House for exaggerating
it<http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/03/obama-administration-sequester-claims-shot-down-by-158626.html?ml=po_r>.


This seems to have won some converts among the tangentially engaged
electorate.

Sure, most people preferred some balance of spending cuts and tax
increases, and a plurality blamed Republicans in Congress for not coming up
with a deal, according the CBS News poll. But the percentage of people who
said that the sequester would either be good for the country or wouldn’t
have a real impact was equal to the percentage of people who believed that
it would be bad for the country.

And, since the country didn’t fall apart during the first week of the
sequester, many Americans may be even more open to the argument that the
administration was crying wolf. In fact, the Dow Jones industrial average
hit a record high this week, and there were no long lines at airports for
any reason other than a brewing snowstorm.

But remember that in the story of the boy who cried wolf, ultimately, a
real wolf does show up after all the false cries, and that very real wolf
destroys a vulnerable flock.

The lesson, as applied to our present dilemma, is that alarmism erodes
credibility, but real danger can still lurk.

The pain of the sequester is that kind that lurks: a slow, creeping
disaster mainly affecting those Americans on the fringes who are barely
inching their way back into a still-bleak job market — or hopelessly locked
out of it — and poor Americans too old or too young to participate in it.

That is how the effects should always have been framed: not as a danger to
air travelers and contractors, but as a prowling danger to the most
vulnerable in our flock.

Not framing it this way harkens back to a larger problem in our culture: a
failure, or outright unwillingness, to acknowledge America’s poor — both
working and not — and to appreciate their struggle.

When I think about the effects of the sequester, I can’t help thinking
about the people in my hometown in rural north Louisiana and in places like
it.

In my hometown, the median family income is less than $30,000, and poverty
rates are staggeringly high, according to the American Community Survey.
This isn’t necessarily because people don’t take work if they can find it,
but because much of the work they can find doesn’t pay a living wage.

So they supplement their salaries with the public benefits they’re eligible
to receive.

The town is also home to the Head Start program for the area, and some of
the only professional jobs available are at the school.

It is in places like this, places full of the working poor who don’t take
airplanes or own stock, that the effects of the sequester will be all too
real.

The director of the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the
sequester could cost 750,000 jobs this year. Those are not likely to be
lost from the top down but from the bottom up. And the estimate of job
losses isn’t simply a factor of government pink slips, but the blow to the
private sector when billions of dollars are withdrawn from the larger
economy.

Pundits and politicians have mocked the cuts for being small in the grand
scheme of an enormous national budget, but those are the callous waggings
of tongues that have never given voice to the fear of poverty or tasted the
bitterness of hunger.

For the rest, the less fortunate, those trying their best to feed their
families and praying that illness passes over their houses, these cuts will
be no joke.

Those are the people the White House and Congressional Democrats should
highlight: good people dealt a poor hand and trying to make good of it.

There is another America, unseen and uncelebrated, where the wolf is ever
sniffing at folks’ heels.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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