On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are busy trying to prevent the sequester, massive spending cuts totaling to roughly $85 billion this year and over $1 trillion over the next ten years, that will hit the federal budget on March 1.
Should lawmakers fail to prevent the sequester, it will lop off a good portion of discretionary spending for defense and domestic programs and will also affect some mandatory domestic spending (most notably Medicare.) No programs will be eliminated, but all will be considerably scaled back.
The sequester will also affect federal employment. According to a Washington Post article, about 800,000 employees at the Pentagon will be put on unpaid leave if Congress cannot obtain a solution to the sequester. Military members and their families will also face cuts to benefit programs. Economic growth in the United States is also expected to slow and unemployment will raise a quarter of a percentage.
The sequester is the result of the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011. It was intended to be an incentive for Congress to come to an agreement to cut federal spending, however, no agreement was ever reached. Originally, the sequester was supposed to take place in the beginning of this year (during the fiscal cliff crisis), but Congress made a deal to prevent the cliff and the sequester was delayed for another two months.
Nobody in Congress is pleased with the situation; neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can agree on how to best prevent the sequester.
President Obama and the Democrats are suggesting that the best way is to increase taxes. Obama has advocated for closing tax loopholes and increasing tax rates for the wealthy. The Democrats in Congress are pushing for tax increases, spread out over the course of a decade, and they are also recommending other measures such as cutting farm subsidies and tax subsidies for oil companies.
Republicans, on the other hand, do not want to raise taxes at all and thus find themselves not able to agree with Democrat proposals. Republicans are also very concerned about defense spending being cut, more so than domestic spending, and are pushing for considerably large domestic spending cuts instead. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Speaker of the House, John Boehner, wrote, “The president’s sequester is the wrong way to reduce the deficit, but it is here to stay until Washington Democrats get serious about cutting spending. The government simply cannot keep delaying the inevitable and spending money it doesn’t have.”
Overall, the sequester is another issue in the long debate over the size and role of the federal government, with the Democrats on the side of an expanded government and Republicans on the side of a smaller government. The results of the sequester that arise within the next week should be a test case to the larger debate. Hopefully, though, Congress will find a compromise to the sequester that is appealing to both political parties and will secure the future of American defense and overall well-being.