"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Sequestration Bogeyman (cont.)

More chart-fu on why the sequestration bogeyman is a great big nothing-burger:



























Or there's this:




























I keep saying this in various contexts, but it's always valid.   If the small things you are debating (spending cuts) are within the margin of error for how accurately you can calculate the big things (federal spending) you should be debating, then debating the small things is a colossal waste of time.   The "cuts" contemplated by the sequester mechanism are not just meaningless because they're small, they're meaningless because they're literally meaningless. 

We should be debating how we are going to unwind Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare, wealth transfer programs we can't afford and which are, in fact, immoral.   We should be asking why it is ethical (or even constitutional) for us to compel a diminished economic future and more dangerous national security future for Americans yet unborn who might be working in 2053 by borrowing money from the Chinese so that workers in 2013 don't have to pay taxes to pay for the consumption of workers of 1983 who are now retired.   Whatever happened to intergenerational equity?

Instead.   We.   Fiddle.   While.   Rome.   Burns.

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