ANYTHING PEACEFUL

Lawrence Reed in an NRO Symposium on "The Sequester"

FEBRUARY 27, 2013 by THE FREEMAN

FEE President Lawrence Reed has been featured in a National Review Online symposium on "The Sequester."

Reed writes:

No one would ever argue with a straight face that this is the way to run an enterprise—a household, a business, a government, or anything else. We send people to Washington to make tough decisions. Then they put the toughest ones on a kind of auto-pilot.

I take that back. The sequester will not implement any tough decisions. All the sequester does is cut one-fortieth of projected non-entitlement spending over the next decade. That comes on the heels of a bipartisan explosion in federal spending over the last decade. Yet not a soul in the “we don’t have a spending problem” Democratic party, and only a handful of Republicans, can muster the courage to endorse specific cuts of the magnitude that would put Washington’s fiscal house in order. A truly “tough” (and urgently necessary) decision would be to lop off entire departments, functions, and purposes of the federal Frankenstein, but almost no one is talking about that.

Read the rest at NRO.