© Tim Martin | Dreamstime.comSequester opponents, including
the White House, congressional Democrats, and a slew of industry
lobbying groups who stand to lose from the reductions, have issued
all manner of hyperbolic warnings about the doom that will surely
afflict us all should the spending reductions go into effect March
2: It will
hurt small businesses run by women, slowdown meat production
(sorry, paleo-dieters), cause the Air Force to fly less, and,
according to Energy Secretary Steven Chu “could”—could!—“weaken
efforts to become more energy independent.” 

The display of spending-cut scare tactics offer a window in the
worldview of those who seem to believe that government spending is
the fuel on which the economy runs, and to undertake any kind of
federal spending reduction at all is to start a journey to an
apocalyptic hellscape. One can only imagine what they’d say about a
package that, unlike the sequester, actually cut spending over the
next decade, or even just held it flat at current levels.

If you want a clue as to what some sequester opponents fear the
most, though, check out what health care lobbyist Emily Holubowich,
who represents 3,000 nonprofits opposed to the sequester,
told The Washington Post on Saturday: “The good news
is, the world doesn’t end March 2. The bad news is, the world
doesn’t end March 2,” she said. “The worst-case scenario for us is
the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens. And Republicans
say: See, that wasn’t so bad.”

That’s the real fear here: not that sequestration will result in
terrible things happening, but that it won’t result in very much at
all, that few will notice or be deeply upset by its effects, and
that people will learn to live with a government that spends very
slightly less than it was planning to over the next ten years
(though still far more than it did for the vast majority of the
last decade).

It’s worth remembering, too, that sequester opponents are mostly
fretting about a small share of the sequester—the $85 billion in
reductions to this year’s budget, only about $44 billion of which
would actually go into effect this year. But smaller-scale
reductions have to be fought as much, maybe even more, as the big
cuts, because it’s the smaller reductions that pose the biggest
threat to the endless expansion of federal spending: Not only are
smaller reductions the most likely to happen, they’re also the most
likely to reveal that the world goes on, and the economy doesn’t
collapse, even if Washington decides not to spend a buck or two of
your money.  

In his radio address this weekend, President Obama practically
pleaded with Congress to kill sequestration’s “abitrary” cuts.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. And the thing turned out to be that,
“These cuts don’t have to happen. Congress can turn them off
anytime.” All Congress has to do is compromise. Obama
then
treated listeners to a litany of potential sequestration
terribles: delayed deployment of an aircraft carrier group, parents
having to find childcare for their children, cutbacks to airport
security. (Should we take that as a threat that the Transportation
Security Administration will be even worse? Is that even
possible?)

The White House and its allies have spent a lot of energy
issuing warnings about all the awful, miserable, no-good things
that might happen if sequestration kicks in. But are they really
interested in easing the supposed pain sequestration will
inflict?

Despite calls for compromise and complaints that the
cuts are blunt and not well targeted, the Obama administration has
indicated that it is
uninterested in a floated GOP
proposal that would allow federal agency heads and managers
more flexibility to implement the sequester reductions as they see
fit, focusing the budget restrictions on programs and expenditures
they deem less critical. So is the real worry that the
sequester will be bad? Or that it won’t be bad
enough?