March 1 came and went, and no deal to avoid sequestration was made. This means automatic budget cuts totaling nearly $85.4 billion will be established, slashing programs in special education, military research and the Library of Congress.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the impact of this sequester will shave off about five-eighths of a percent from the projected growth in the Gross Domestic Product this year. Some estimates claim the number of jobs lost because of the sequester will be as high as 2.14 million.
Neither mainstream Democrats nor Republicans ever wanted the sequester to happen. However, no plan or compromise was made to avoid what was unanimously deemed stupid and disastrous.
So now we’re left to wonder why everyone lost.
The sequester originated as a last-minute deal to raise the debt ceiling. It was a compromise to create a plan to decrease spending by $1.5 trillion. It was meant to force Congress to make difficult long-term decisions about fiscal responsibility.
However, it was never meant to act as any kind of serious plan in and of itself. The devastating nature and stupidity of the cuts were meant to compel Washington to create a new plan — one that would cut spending correctly and balance the budget in a reasonable, bipartisan manner.
This never happened, and the issue at the heart of this massive debacle in Washington was — yet again — tax increases.
However, the debate over tax increases was political — not ideological — and this is what is so incriminating about our leaders in Washington today.
Speaker John Boehner proposed a plan last December that would increase tax revenues to more than $800 billion. The plan that eventually came out of Washington only increased tax revenues by about $600 billion.
Clearly, Boehner and the House Republicans who supported his proposal in December are not ideologically against increasing revenues a little bit more, given that their original proposal had revenues from taxes in considerably higher amounts than what they are now.
Moreover, the White House proposed to increase revenues through the same method Boehner and the Republicans suggested in December — tax reform. However, congressional Republicans stood firmly against any and all tax revenues as a part of a deal to avoid sequestration. This discrepancy can only be explained politically, not ideologically.
This is not to say the Republicans are the only ones at fault for playing politics when the jobs of millions of Americans were at stake.
It is difficult not to feel sympathetic for congressional Republicans when we recognize that the Democratic Party got many of the tax increases its members wanted just a couple of months ago, without having to agree to any additional spending cuts.
The tax cuts made under President George W. Bush were set to expire the same day the sequester cuts were to be enacted. This was, no doubt, intentionally done so Washington would create a balanced plan to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. Instead, Washington only increased taxes and kicked the spending cuts down the road to be dealt with March 1.
It is difficult to imagine Republicans would have agreed to the tax increases Jan. 1 if they knew they would have to increase taxes even more two months later.
Republicans compromised and now they feel like they got screwed.
Instead of being sympathetic to this reality, the Democratic Party is now campaigning on the argument that the Republican Party only cares about the rich and is holding the economy hostage because of its out-of-touch beliefs.
This is hardly a way to encourage compromise.
Our government is full of leaders who despise each other and don’t know how to compromise. Our leaders have put politics over ideology, and the result has been disastrous for all of us — the economy will now slow in growth, and millions of Americans might lose their jobs.
In the end, we all lost.