ANTI-STIMULUS (Formerly: Sequestration) Watch -- 4th Dimensional Craps Edition.

[Hugin]

Well, President Obama has spoken and from what I gather the news isn't good.

There will be no Deal. (Not that I was expecting one from the Republican crowd.)

Pleased that I am that the Democrats have so far held to their conviction that the ultimate resolution to the Budget must include revenue and for the Romneys, Ryans, Boehners and Peter Petersons of the world to keep their Ayn Rand inspired mitts off of the Social Safety Nets... This is going to hurt a bit.

But, really... What is the cause of all of this? If you take a short trip in the wayback machine you'll remember that the Republican buzz at the time of the sequester's still birth was all about 'Teh Stimulus!!1i1!' and how it was a stealth operation by Obama Operatives to steal the 2012 election. (If you recall, this same scheme was later voiced by Romney in his Notorious 47% video.)

So, what did the Republican's do? They agreed to this thing called a 'Sequester' which coincidentally was exactly the same amount as the then recently passed Economic Stimulus.

Based on this notion... And lacking any guidance from any credible authority, I'm going to re-christen 'The Sequester' as 'The Anti-Stimulus'. Mostly, because that's exactly the effect it will have on the Economy at large.

Now, I will turn you over to Mr. Taibbi who has his own ponderances about the whole sequestration craps game... Thanks, Mr. Taibbi!

If you can get past how horrifying it is, the looming "sequestration cuts" crisis is fascinating. It's like watching a bunch of gambling addicts play craps by throwing dice into a four-dimensional wormhole. There are so many variables that neither side can possibly know the true outcome of a failure to make a deal – which means the only certainty is that what we're watching is irresponsibility on an epic scale, wherein both of our major political parties seem to prefer government by random outcome over one managed by sensible compromise.

Obviously, most of the problem was originally driven by the intractability of a Republican Party energized politically by its Tea Party base, which preferred the nuclear option of a default or a government shutdown to increased debt and/or new taxes. These fine folks taped sticks of dynamite to their chests and threatened to blow the government, its credit rating and our entire budget mechanism to the moon if we didn't make massive spending cuts – a wild ploy that may not have made a ton of patriotic sense given the catastrophic possibilities of, say, a default, but certainly helped the party solidify its relationship with its base...This "let's blow up the American credit rating" ploy impressed hardcore anti-spending types in the same way. It was crazy, but maybe only slightly more crazy than both of the parties have consistently been for most of the last 20 years, when the two sides have continually failed to hammer out workable budgets and instead have mostly just let the national airplane fly mindlessly forward using the laziness-enabling autopilot mechanism of a continuing resolutions, or CRs. Despite the fact that working out budgets is mostly what we hire members of Congress to do, they seem to have a terrible time doing it on time, and instead routinely rely upon the CR process (in which the two sides basically agree to put things off until later) to keep funding levels static for some ludicrously short-term period like six months.

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term. It's an incredibly stupid way of doing business and if these people weren't on television so often, ranting and raving like baseball managers arguing a safe call at the plate and playing to the home crowd by pointing fingers at the other side, they would probably just do what members of Congress traditionally did in the pre-mass-media age, which is quietly and (mostly) sensibly work things out, getting as much as they could for their own constituents without crossing the line into antipatriotic acts of self-destruction – like a national default, for instance...

In agreeing to this crazy deal a year and a half ago – a deal they were, admittedly, forced into – the Dems banked on the notion that the Republicans would never countenance deep cuts to the Pentagon and in that way leave themselves exposed politically to accusations of making the country less safe. But the Republicans – humorously if you can still find humor in this – have not yet blinked here, which is why the Obama administration is shamelessly rolling Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano out this week to make sure Americans everywhere know that terrorists will be crawling through their children's bedroom windows as early as next week if the Republicans don't back down on this budget thing. ("I don't think we can maintain the same level of security . . . with sequester," she said, adding that the impact will grow over time, like "a rolling ball.&quot In a comically blunt use of reverse race-baiting politics, Napolitano added that she would have to furlough 5,000 border patrol agents if the sequester cuts took place, essentially threatening Republican voters with an influx of immigrants from Mexico if a deal isn't reached...We hated it when George Bush threatened us with the specter of terrorist attacks to get what he wanted politically, so we ought to be hating this, too, although fortunately it hasn't gotten quite to Bush levels yet – I'm assuming we're still weeks away from Obama himself going out to the Rose Garden to tell reporters that unmanned terror drones will be spraying poison over New York City if the Republicans don't give him his budget deal. The Republicans, meanwhile, are banking on the notion that $85 billion in annual cuts isn't all that much (and considering that the Fed doled out more than that to Citigroup alone in just one month of 2009, their argument makes some sense) and the country will barely notice the damage if we have to go over this particular waterfall. The political capital they may lose with the Pentagon in (potentially) letting this happen is an interesting side issue, but one most Americans probably aren't losing much sleep over.
... the whole thing sucks. It's like being permanently stuck in the NFL lockout story. Do we really have to do this every three months for the rest of eternity?

Please, read the rest here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/sequestration-cuts-crisis-makes-me-want-to-strangle-both-sides-20130226#ixzz2M7jlraBf