FEE President Lawrence Reed has been featured in a National Review Online symposium on “The Sequester.”
Reed writes:
No one would ever argue with a straight face that this is the way to run an enterprise—a household, a business, a government, or anything else. We send people to Washington to make tough decisions. Then they put the toughest ones on a kind of auto-pilot.
I take that back. The sequester will not implement any tough decisions. All the sequester does is cut one-fortieth of projected non-entitlement spending over the next decade. That comes on the heels of a bipartisan explosion in federal spending over the last decade. Yet not a soul in the “we don’t have a spending problem” Democratic party, and only a handful of Republicans, can muster the courage to endorse specific cuts of the magnitude that would put Washington’s fiscal house in order. A truly “tough” (and urgently necessary) decision would be to lop off entire departments, functions, and purposes of the federal Frankenstein, but almost no one is talking about that.
