Well, it’s Sequester Eve, and both Democrat and Republican bills to address the government-manufactured crisis have failed. This shouldn’t be surprising. When the alternatives are the national government getting its act together and X, X is a safer bet than Social Security.
The sequester comprises $85 Billion in across-the-board (with some exceptions, of course) cuts in the projected increase in federal spending. Who’s forcing these “cuts”? The government. The sequester is the result of a 2011 bipartisan deal that mandated the so-called cuts if Congress failed to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 Trillion over ten years, which it has.
Brimming with confidence, President Barack Obama in recent days has been perfecting the good side of his one-man good-cop/bad-cop routine, blaming congressional Republicans for the deal he signed, while warning of such dire consequences as “airport security … see[ing] cutbacks” and parents having to “scramble” to find someone to care for the children they brought into the world.
As terrifying as these specters may be to believers in the beneficent bureaucracy (and even if they really were likely to hit full force tomorrow), parents having to replace Big Nanny with small nannies and the TSA having fewer agents around to scare toddlers isn’t the end of the world. The sequester’s doomsday machine is a water pistol.
What is scary is a government so incompetent that it isn’t even capable of forcing itself out of its own incompetence—after giving itself nearly two years to do so. The national government has simply become too big, too bloated, and too bureaucratic to manage itself.
There are reasons why the Founders sought to limit what Congress may spend the taxpayers’ money on. When government, where greed wears the mask of morality, usurps power beyond the Constitution, it steps outside the place where it truly can be a force for good and violates the rights it has been empowered to protect, and the people suffer.
Oh well, if you’ve seen one Constitutional republic founded on the idea that government exists to secure rights, you’ve seen them all.
