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<div class="">February 21, 2013</div>
<h1>The D.C. Dubstep</h1>
<h6 class="">By
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<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by DAVID BROOKS"><span>DAVID BROOKS</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
On July 26, 2011, Jack Lew, then the White House budget director, went
to Harry Reid’s office for a budget strategy session. According to Bob
Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics,” Lew told the Senate majority
leader that they had come up with a trigger idea to force a budget deal.
</p>
<p>
“What’s the idea?” Reid asked. </p>
<p>
“Sequestration,” Lew responded. </p>
<p>
Reid folded himself over with his head between his knees, as if he were
going to throw up. Then he came upright and gaped at the ceiling. “A
couple of weeks ago,” he exclaimed, “my staff said to me there is one
more possible” enforcement method: sequestration. Reid said he had told
his staff at the time, “Get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The
White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And
you come to me with sequestration?” </p>
<p>
Sequestration may have seemed insane back then. But politicians in both
parties are secretly discovering that they love sequestration now. It
allows them to do the dance moves they enjoy the most. </p>
<p>
Democrats get to do the P.C. Shimmy. Traditional presidents go through a
normal set of motions: They identify a problem. They come up with a
proposal to address the problem. They try to convince the country that
their proposal is the best approach. </p>
<p>
Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy, the president identifies a problem.
Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem.
Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that
doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he
goes around the country blasting the opposition for not having as
politically popular a concept. Then he returns to Washington and
congratulates himself for being the only serious and substantive person
in town. </p>
<p>
Sequestration allows the White House to do this all over again. The
president hasn’t actually come up with a proposal to avert
sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible. </p>
<p>
He does have a vague and politically convenient concept. (Tax increases
on the rich!) He does have a chance to lead the country into a budget
showdown with furloughed workers and general mayhem, for which people
will primarily blame Republicans. And he does have the chance to achieve
the same thing he has achieved so frequently over the past two years,
political success and legislative mediocrity. </p>
<p>
Republicans also secretly love the sequester. It allows them to do their
favorite dance move, the Suicide Stage Dive. It was pioneered by Newt
Gingrich in 1995 and has been repeated constantly since. </p>
<p>
In this dance, the Republicans mount the stage and roar that they are
about to courageously cut spending. In this anthem they carefully
emphasize cuts to programs the country sympathizes with, such as special
education, while sparing programs that actually created the debt
problem, like Medicare. </p>
<p>
Then, when they have worked themselves up into a frenzy of
self-admiration, they sprint across the stage and leap into what they
imagine is the loving arms of their adoring fans. When they are 4 feet
off the ground, they realize the voters have left the building in
disgust and they land with a thud on the floor. </p>
<p>
Sequestration allows the Republicans to do the Suicide Stage Dive to
perfection. Voters disdain the G.O.P. because they think Republicans are
mindless antigovernment fanatics who can’t distinguish good government
programs from bad ones. Sequestration is a fanatically mindless piece of
legislation that can’t distinguish good government programs from bad
ones. Sequestration carefully spares programs like Medicare and Social
Security that actually contribute to the debt problem. Sequestration
will cause maximum political disgust for a trivial amount of budget
savings. </p>
<p>
So, of course, the conservative press is filling up with essays with
titles like “Learning to Love Sequestration.” Of course, Republican
legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course,
after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling
back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive. </p>
<p>
These two dance moves, the P.C. Shimmy and the Suicide Stage Dive, when
combined, are beautifully guaranteed to cause maximum damage to the
country. What’s America’s biggest problem right now? It is that business
people think that government is so dysfunctional that they are afraid
to invest and spur growth. So what are the parties going to do? They are
going to prove that government is so dysfunctional that you’d be crazy
to invest and spur growth. </p>
<p>
In a normal country, the politicians would try some new moves. For
example, if they agreed to further means test Medicare they could save a
lot of money. Democrats would be hitting the rich. Republicans would be
reforming entitlements. </p>
<p>
But no. Both parties love their current moves. It’s enough to make Harry
Reid put his head between his legs and throw up. </p>
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<div class="">February 21, 2013</div>
<h1>Sequester of Fools</h1>
<h6 class="">By
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<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by PAUL KRUGMAN"><span>PAUL KRUGMAN</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan
Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned
us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, <a title="A Wall Street Journal Washington Wire posting" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/03/08/bowles-simpson-fiscal-crisis-could-come-within-2-years/">two years</a>
unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but
they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re
interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made
it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising
taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to
the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts.
</p>
<p>
But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and
Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when
Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face
of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we
forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that
would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.
</p>
<p>
That moment has now passed; <a title="A Politico report" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/03/08/bowles-simpson-fiscal-crisis-could-come-within-2-years/">even Mr. Bowles concedes</a>
that the search for a grand bargain is on “life support.” Let’s convene
a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives
on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our
nation’s history. </p>
<p>
Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented
hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to
raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain
on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to
buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was
to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous
damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was
reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will
go off at the end of next week. </p>
<p>
There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the
sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The
truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea.
But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is
who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared
mistake. </p>
<p>
The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America
doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime
soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too
slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the
vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, <a title="A pdf of a recent speech" href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20130211a.pdf">recently emphasized</a>,
one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending
has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should
be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the
sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order. </p>
<p>
Unfortunately, <a title="More details on the sequester" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/20/the-sequester-absolutely-everything-you-could-possibly-need-to-know-in-one-faq/">neither party is proposing</a>
that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate
Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most
destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable
members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying
austerity in a way that would protect the economy. </p>
<p>
House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad
about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense
budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and
replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would
hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing
injustice. </p>
<p>
As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester
as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both
should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A
middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending
cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while
Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the
proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen
under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at
all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen. </p>
<p>
So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two
self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A
failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world
financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff
would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have
plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, <a href="http://macroadvisers.blogspot.com/2013/02/mas-alternative-scenario-march-1_19.html#%21/2013/02/mas-alternative-scenario-march-1_19.html">will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs</a>. </p>
<p>
But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas —
ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced
represented deep wisdom. </p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br><br><br>
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