Memo to Washington Post: The Sequester's Causing REAL Damage

July 7, 2013

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

As I write this I’m doing what many of you are doing---or wish you were doing---spending a few relaxing days with family at the beach. This beach happens to be in Delaware.

About 40 miles north, at Dover Air Force base, nearly 1,500 civilian workers are doing something they wish they were NOT doing---taking time off without pay. These workers maintain aircraft and perform other missions for the Department of Defense’s largest and busiest air freight terminal. Twenty-five percent of the nation’s strategic airlift capability goes through Dover.

Before the year is over these workers will lose about 20 percent of their income because of forced unpaid furloughs. So will nearly 700,000 other Defense Department workers and hundreds of thousands of others employed by federal, state and local governments and private contractors who work with government agencies.

They’ve all been caught in the sequester net congressional Republicans dropped over public service. These workers keep our military capability strong, they fight forest fires, they check rivers and streams for potential flash floods, they feed the hungry and man day care centers.

At least these people have jobs, even if they have to struggle to pay their bills with skinnier pay checks.

Because of the sequester, the longest-term unemployed are seeing a 15% reduction in their benefits, to an average $246 a week.

The sequester also is doing real harm to many seniors who depend on the government’s Meals on Wheels programs for food. Estimates are that 40% of the nation’s Meals on Wheels programs are laying off people, 50% are cutting back on the number of seniors they serve and 70% are reducing the number of meals.

Hundreds of thousands of children in poor families are having food and housing benefits reduced or being cut off from them entirely. Head Start programs are trimming hours, cutting enrollment or shutting down.

As we pay tribute to the 19 firefighters who died battling a treacherous blaze in Arizona it’s worth mentioning that the sequester has chopped 500 Forest Service firefighting positions and reduced the equipment and resources available to those on the fire line.

The Washington Post published a particularly appalling front page article the other day, spinning the sequester’s impact as far less damaging than the White House had forecast. That’s basically the view of many House Republicans who insisted on the sequester in the first place and are pressuring their leadership to maintain these senseless cuts through 2014 and beyond. Later this year House Republicans will hold the debt ceiling increase hostage again, demanding even more cuts.

The $85 billion one-year budget cut “has not produced what the Obama administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services,” the Post concluded. And that’s true enough. But for the White House to avoid “widespread breakdowns” it’s had to make plenty of wrenching decisions to cut or eliminate important services.

Yes, Washington Post editors, the government’s still standing. But what about those skilled Dover aircraft technicians who can’t survive a 20% pay cut? How many of them now will just commute a few miles north of Dover to Wilmington’s airport and apply to American Airlines? What about the reduction of giant military cargo planes available to airlift troops and supplies in an emergency? What about the training program that’s the heartbeat of keeping a force that’s skilled and reliable?

Sure the government can get along with less money. But there are consequences.

We already see that in the 17,000 U.S. bridges that have gone too long without repair, and $2 trillion more that's needed to bring our roads, water and sewer systems, airport runways and other neglected infrastructure up to reasonable standard. With sequester, we’re digging that hole deeper.

Republicans who demanded the sequester said that it would amount to only a 2.4 percent cut in all federal spending. But the sequester exempts Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and some other big ticket programs, including military personnel. What’s left got cut the way oafish nitwit business managers would do it, a percentage of all other programs without regard to importance or need.

And that’s just the beginning. If sequestration remains in effect for its full ten years, the cuts will continue to add up to the tune of about $100 billion a year.

A few days after the Post gloated about no “widespread breakdown” of government services, one of the Post’s own columnists, David Ignatius, detailed many of the ways services will break down over time if the sequestration isn’t ended. Ignatius likened the sequester to “eating your seed corn.” Translation: no corn next year if you have nothing to plant. An apt analogy.

Those who see the U.S. as a nation too poor to feed its hungry or pay for research, or too financially fragile to fix decaying infrastructure, will applaud a government policy that shrinks government down to one that does little more than defend our borders and collect taxes.

That, of course, is the logical endpoint of what House Republicans are working toward.

But is it what Americans want? Avoiding a “widespread breakdown” of government services isn’t an achievement to be applauded. It’s a policy to be changed. And changed before the damage it’s causing the U.S. grows even worse.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)