Over at Talking Points Memo, Brian Beutler is
torn up over the willingness of the Senate to pass a waiver to
sequestration rules for the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA).

Late last night it took a break from its regular schedule of
lacking 60 votes to shampoo the chamber carpet and unanimously
passed a bill that will provide the FAA unique flexibility under
sequestration — and thus halt the furloughs that have been
causing travel delays around the country. Today the House will
follow suit, and the White House has made it clear President Obama
intends to sign it. Great if you fly. Bad, bad news if you’re on
head start or rely on meals on wheels or otherwise aren’t a
Priority Pass holder.

Aside the obvious iniquity, this is a big error.

The point of sequestration is supposedly to create just enough
chaos that regular people — people with political clout, such as,
say, business travelers — demand that Congress fix it. Or as the
Democrats conceived it, to create the public pressure they need to
knock Republicans off their absolutist position on taxes.

More here.

Having apparently missed out on the decades-old deregulation of
airline-ticket pricing, Beutler implicitly equates the mundane act
of flying with, I don’t know, wearing monocles, lighting cigars
with $100 bills, and other excresences of capitalism only available
to the super-rich. This, despite the fact that over 80 percent of
Americans
have flown.

The original point of sequestration, or automatic,
across-the-board cuts urged by Barack Obama, was to provide a spur
to force Congress to come up with a specific (yet tiny) level of
spending cuts that were agreed to as part of a barely remembered
debt-limit deal. When that didn’t happen – despite plenty of time
and delays – the result is that around 1 percent to 2 percent of
total federal spending is being trimmed in fiscal 2013. But don’t
worry: The feds are on track to spend more this year than last year
even when you factor in sequestration. And for all the fretting
over minor spending trims that are routinely described as barbaric
and brutal and unconscionable, the long list of
programs exempted from sequestration ensures that nobody
is going to go hungry or naked due to cuts amounting to around $44
billion in this fiscal year. Sadly, that statement is also true
for
the Department of Defense and its contractors, who are
taking the single-biggest hit but still doing quite
fine.

So it turns out that the FAA has enough money in its
cut-to-the-bone budget to keep planes flying as if nothing happened
– all it has to do is shift dollars from a useless activity to one
that actually has an impact. The ease with which the FAA apparently
can do that underscores the real fear of sequestration opponents:
People will realize that a federal budget of around $3.6 trillion –
or roughly double the amount that was spent in nominal dollars the
last year Bill Clinton was in office (and 50 percent more in

constant 2012 dollars) – is plenty big enough to cover all core
government functions even if you think the government should do
just about everything. 

And in case you’re wondering, air traffic control is not a
core government function. Back in 2009, Reason’s Bob Poole
explained how the FAA is using ridiculously outmoded technology to
direct flights, even as Canada has fully demonstrated that spinning
off that function to the airlines is better and more efficient.
Indeed, “commercializing” air traffic control even has the support
of characters such as Al Gore: