By Adam Bitely — If you are reading this, you have survived sequestration.
The world didn’t end. Food is still safe to eat. Planes are landing safely on runways. Invading armies are not storming our shores. And life is continuing on normally just as it was yesterday.
This fact must be making the heads of Washington, D.C. politicians explode. For all the rhetoric that had been thrown around about the impending doom that the nation faced, nothing disastrous has happened.
As Obama put it, the sequester would “imperil our economy, our national security (and) vital programs that middle class families depend on.” Further, it would be a “a huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole.”
The sequester was simply a reduction of one dollar from every six dollars of spending increases to discretionary spending since 2008. The government will spend more money next year than it does this year. The sequester was merely a microscopic reduction in spending growth rates.
But the facts never mattered to the politicians. In fact, many of them forgot their own statements from the times when they supported the sequester.
That’s right. Many of the people bemoaning the sequester previously supported it.
In the aftermath of the passage of the debt ceiling increase in August of 2011 that resulted in the sequestration, House Speaker John Boehner told CBS news that he got 98 percent of what he wanted in the debt deal.
In November 2011, Obama told the media that he would veto efforts to stop the sequester.
Clearly the sequester is not as bad as these people advertised in the run-up to today.
For too long politicians have been able to get away with making absurd claims to the media about the impending doom of a cut to government spending. The fact that we are all alive and well today proves that you can cut government and that it will not result in the end of the world.
The theatrical renditions of Chicken Little that we have all been subjected to by John Boehner and Barack Obama have proven to be exactly what they were—theatrical performances.
Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com. You can follow NetRightDaily on Twitter at @NetRightDaily.
