The morning of sequestration, I'm not sure Magic Frank understands what it is

by: Eric B.

Fri Mar 01, 2013 at 09:40:50 AM EST

A little history for the history averse ... back a couple of years ago, the president and Congress couldn't agree on raising the debt ceiling, mostly because Republicans who control the House didn't understand the difference between spending money and paying bills. They held up the paying bills for money already spent part because they wanted cuts in spending. It was dumb, and pointless, and caused our collective credit rating to take a hit from Moody's because we merely threatened to default, but in the end the debt ceiling was raised and what we got was a law mandating budget cuts that by design were ugly enough that everyone assumed it would push Congress and the president to cooperate. They didn't, and today because of it those painful-by-design cuts are the law of the land.

Magic Frank confuses this with austerity, which are budget cuts not designed on purpose to be painful but to simply reduce spending on the idea that government cannot afford the programs.

In Europe, it's been called austerity, the effort to reduce unsustainable debt caused by years of profligate government spending and socialist programs which have crippled the economies of Greece, Spain, Italy, and other European nations.

Our televisions have flashed the pictures of riots in those countries where citizens had grown accustomed to years' worth of entitlements that they believed were neverending.

Despite the lessons to be learned from the failed European model, America has raced headlong toward emulating that example.

It's happened thanks to the accelerated rate of government spending fueled by the leftist ideology of President Barack Obama and the complicity of a timid Republican Party that has feared receiving the blame — fault they've been assessed anyways — for causing the pain that comes from trying to undo the damage of such economic ineptitude.

In addition to not understanding the difference between austerity and sequestration, he continues to promote the myth that the deficit has been caused by "runaway spending" by the president.

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

That was just the first four paragraphs of Magic Frank's latest column. The tally was one howler of a factual error and a monumental misunderstanding of the topic at hand. The fifth paragraph continues his monumental misunderstanding directly. Then, later on, he interjects something about 500 illegal aliens released, and asks why they were being held in the first place if they posed no danger to society (perhaps, the answer is that it was determined that it was safe to release them and that there was otherwise no reason to detain them).

Obama has the choice of where he wants to cut $85 billion in spending under sequester and he has told us he wants to make life more difficult for those paying the taxes that allow the government to spend rather than those who benefit from the success of others.

Only someone incredibly crass or just stupid would use the way the sequestration rules were written as an excuse to accuse the president of playing class warfare. That's because Congressional Republicans agreed with the president to exempt social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid (except for a cut to Medicare providers). As to the idea that the cuts are at the president's discretion, this is yet another howling factual error. Under a section entitled, "How much flexibility do agency heads have?"

Not much. The sequester must be applied evenly to every “program, project, and activity.” What is a program, or a project, or an activity, you ask? No one really knows, and OMB will have to define that. But the last time we did a sequester, an example of an activity was an individual buoy floating in the Chesapeke Bay. That buoy had to be cut by 5 percent. So no, administrators don’t have much flexibility. Their hands are largely tied.

This isn't classified information, mind you, but stuff that's being reported all over the mainstream media, from actual news gathering outfits that lean left to actual news gathering outfits that lean right. What we can now be certain of is that Magic Frank doesn't get his information from any of those places. He gets it in that magical fairyland where not only are you entitled to your own opinion, you're entitled to your own facts.

By the way, rumpled newspaperman Jack Spencer at CapCon also promotes the idea that sequestration is just a round of budget cuts. This must be why people used to describe him as the least accurate member of the Lansing press corps when he was with MIRS.