Calculating cuts

LITTLE ROCK — It may be that we should let sequestration happen March 1 and look for a sunrise on March 2.

There, I wrote it.

I actually said it out loud two days ago to a serious and indeed rarefied lunch group, one prominent and bipartisan and learned.

I got not one detraction. I got some nods. I got some blank stares.

But no one cried out in the recent style of President Barack Obama, who, frankly, is getting a tad tiresome with his Reaganesque stagecraft designed to go over the head of Congress and into our living rooms.

The president put some first responders around himself Tuesday as he pronounced that sequestration could well mean there would not be enough first responders to serve us in disasters.

That would be bad, I grant you.

But I’m saying that we should think on this:

Maybe the federal government could get by for a while on these general across-the-board cuts amounting to $85.4 billion as applied for the remainder of this federal fiscal year. Maybe we would experience a soft landing in the beginning, since we wouldn’t be taking $85.4 million out of circulation all at once.

If not-if the landing was hard, or even if it was temporarily soft-then there always would be another federal budget cliffhanger around the corner. These crises are monthly anymore.

Actually, there’s a handy one coming in April when the budget resolution expires.

That would provide an opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to fix untenable cuts from sequestration by shoring up anything that posed a credible threat of recession.

That could happen, you know-recession, that is-and we need to be aware of that.

Our projected annual economic growth rate is 3 percent or lower now. Some people say that the re-imposition of full payroll taxes could drop that a little.

And, yes, taking sequestration’s arbitrary cuts of $42.7 million from defense contracts and $42.7 million from domestic programs could extract enough employment and activity to dip us toward a no-growth, or recessionary, condition.

Those stock-market gains already this year have been nice. People will not much like it if those gains get undone by investors rendered anxious by potentially damaging federal budget cuts.

But if we had to start putting back expenditures, maybe then, but only then, might the congressional willbecome sufficiently strong to offset those expenditure restorations with more tenable and surgical offsetting cuts-or to pay for them by plugging tax loopholes.

What we’re doing now plainly isn’t working.

This is all rich irony, of course. Most things are anymore.

The whole idea of sequestration-which came from the White House,but was embraced by Republicans-was that we would propose such automatic, across-the-board and draconian cuts that Congress would appoint a “super-committee” to avert them with more responsible reductions.

Beyond that, the political calculation was that Democrats would never stand for sequestration’s domestic cuts, and that Republicans would never stand for sequestration’s defense cuts.

But it didn’t work, probably because it was all in the abstract.

So maybe we need to move it over to reality for a little while.

And now, by the way, there are Republicans saying the Pentagon needs to suck it up, too, and calculating that it would hurt Obama politically-and help them-if we actually sustained new defense vulnerability.

So we confront two truths: We cannot long go on with this rising debt. But we can’t so trim the federal government that the constriction imperils the general economy or national security.

I’m saying that maybe we should start, on March 1, to take $85.4 billion out of the government to see how it feels and to help us build the will to do something more thoughtful and responsible.

In the event it doesn’t hurt much, we might even let next year’s scheduled sequestration go into effect.

But I’m not counting on that. And I am not yet prepared to say it out loud.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.