The Sequestration and Napolitano's Burqa

I want you to imagine that you are in serious financial trouble.  You have to regain control or lose all.  You decide to start by cutting your spending, go hard core, slashing and burning your way through the budget.  To simplify things, we will zero in on just one easy target.  The numbers and percentages are real, but the scope is small enough to wrap your arms around.  I am going to ask you to use your weekly grocery bill as an example of your entire yearly expenditures.  We are not going to examine reality, but how reality works. 

            For every $10 you spend on your groceries you must slash (I repeat, SLASH!!!) 7 pennies.  You heard it, 7 cents per sawbuck.  If you spend $100/week on groceries you will have to cut 70 cents—yup, less than $1 out of the $100.  What would you give up?  Would you even notice?  Would your family notice?  Could you live without those 70 cents?  I could more than cover that by buying the store’s own brand of bread instead of a name brand. 

Do you think 70 cents per week will help you balance your budget?  Do you think the amount is so small it is laughable?  Here is the problem; that is how much money the Federal government cut out of their mandatory spending through the cuts from the dreaded, “sequester.”   [I am using mandatory instead of discretionary expenditures as an example because that is by far the largest part of the economy.]  

Of course their numbers look much larger because we are talking about the whole Federal enchilada.  “Wait,” you say.  “I have read that those cuts amount to $16.3 billion.  That doesn’t sound like $0.07/$10.”  Welcome to the unbelievable numbers that are our out-of-control Federal budget.  Our mandatory expenditures amount to $2.12 trillion per year.  The $16.3 billion in cuts amounts to 0.007 percent of the 2.12 trillion, which is 7 cents out of every 10 dollars. 

When the numbers get this big they became easier for the legislature to manipulate.  Numbers so far beyond our frame of reference turn into monopoly money.  The grand, “Sequester” was intended to coerce the American public into support of rampant spending by talking big while doing little.  Since the difference between the budget, “Before the Sequester” (B.S. if you will) and the budget after the Sequester is insignificant, the making of political hay from this situation is patently self-serving.  

This political foolishness brings me to Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.  The Obama administration is trying desperately to manipulate public opinion with the specter of dysfunction if the Little Prince doesn’t get his way, Napolitano, ever the compliant toady, decided to chum the waters of dire consequences by releasing 2,000 illegal aliens.  Poor Janet just can’t take her burqa off. She has drunk so much of the Obama’s kool-aid that she doesn’t even ask him what he wants any more, she simply intuits his wishes.  She wanted to show him that she could scare people as well as the next person, so she released the aliens. 

It is interesting that Sec. Napolitano is now back-peddling from her actions by changing first the numbers and then the reasons for the releases, but it is all too visible as political posturing.  The President, petulant as ever, has cancelled tours of the White House, “due to sequester” but Napolitano released criminals on our streets in flagrant disregard of homeland security.  This fool should be fired.

Call the bluff and keep the faith.