Congress: Replace 1 Year Of Modest Cuts With 10 Years Of Miniscule Cuts And We’ll Call It Even

This is absurd.

Brad Plumer at WaPo recounts the 4 plans in play to stop the sequester. And it’s astounding. It’s made ever more clear to me that nobody in Washington is serious about cutting spending. Right now we’re 15 days away from the implementation of $85.3B in 2013 spending cuts. Oh, for the record, that’s roughly in the realm of 2 fucking percent of this year’s budget.

First, there are three Democrat plans; the Senate plan, the House plan, and the President’s plan. So what are the Democrats proposing? Small spending cuts and modest tax increases. Exactly what you’d expect. Both plans seem to take spending cuts out of farm subsidies, which tells me one thing: they know farm states are red states and they’re gonna punish them for it.

But what’s notable about those plans? They replace $85.3B of cuts this year with spending and taxation over 10 years. Talk about playing kick the can! In fact, both Congressional Democrat plans really do almost nothing to affect the 2013 deficit. They’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Second, we’ve got the Republicans. They know they can’t touch entitlements. They absolutely refuse to take a penny out of defense. So what’s left? Cuts to a whole host of social programs that they know they can’t actually pass, so they get red meat for the base without actually having to cut a single thing.

And the President? Well, if we can’t solve the sequester, he’s not even talking about kicking the can out to next year, he’s talking about kicking it merely a few months:

“If Congress can’t act immediately on a bigger package, if they can’t get a bigger package done by the time the sequester is scheduled to go into effect,” Obama said in the White House briefing room, “then I believe that they should at least pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms that would delay the economically damaging effects of the sequester for a few more months.”

As I said last fall, maybe the best answer is to just let the sequester happen.