As press time clamped down on us, barring a last-minute miracle, President Barack Obama was to have ordered the much-feared sequestration, or across-the-board set of budget cuts, totaling $1.2 trillion, from defense and nondefense spending across the next 10 years. We’re assuming Obama isn’t displaying one-upmanship on this, because his only competition is the Republican Party. Really, considering that, how much game need he bring?
The president has resorted to drama-queen status with comments such as, “It will jeopardize military readiness; it will eviscerate job-creating investments in education, energy and medical research” (and we assume the evisceration was set in motion by his economic team). In other words, this represents the same tired dime-store ploy of trying to scare Americans over what amounts to a 5-percent cut to domestic agencies and a 7-percent cut to the military. Bottom line: Those cuts in question, $85 billion, amount to 2.3 percent of total spending.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the agencies the White House says can’t save 5 percent actually received an average increase in their budgets of 17 percent in the previous five years, not counting, of course, their $276 billion stimulus bonus. So how much smaller a thinker can our president be? We find it incredibly ironic that one of the top films of the year, “Lincoln,” about which much has been written, specifically related to President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership ability, intelligence, the skill with which he unified our nation and arguably took his place in history as one of the best presidents, if not the best. We now are faced with debatably the worst president in American history, and as this mess authoritatively becomes law of the land, as we anticipate it will, the impact of it won’t be known for some time. Buckle up.