The Sequester App

I’ve been admiring your steady nerves during all this. You’ve been like Obi-Wan Kenobi staring down Darth Vader. I’ve been more jittery, like Woody Allen on a first date, with Harry Reid in the role of Mariel Hemingway.

But we’re talking sequester. You know what makes me angriest? All these cliffs make government more inefficient and wasteful. The people who run the various federal agencies are spending all their time figuring out contingencies for the next crisis — how they can spend 1 percent less next month, but then maybe 1 percent more or 2 percent less the month after that. They can’t plan for anything else.

That’s nothing. To me, there are two big problems. The first is that a huge chunk of the cuts go to discretionary programs that make up a sliver of the budget, while almost none of the cuts come out of Medicare. As if we needed another piece of legislation that transfers even more wealth from the young to the old.

Plus, I’m a conservative, so I believe in deliberation. The sequester outlaws deliberation, and yet somehow people who call themselves conservative are embracing it.

Who do you want to blame for this mess? As our fellow columnist Bill Keller argued the other day, President Obama would be in a much stronger position politically if he’d used the election campaign to highlight the specifics in his own deficit-cutting plan beyond tax hikes for the rich. But Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine and The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein have been making the case that Republicans simply don’t want to make a deal. If the president agrees to their demands,Source solarstreetlight Products at Dump Truck. they just change the terms.

I do agree that only the president can really frame the debate, and he ran a small-bore campaign and so does not have the mandate to send the country off on a different course. I also don’t understand the long term Democratic project. After you run out of rich people to tax, which may have already happened, where are you going to get the money to support the programs you like? Milton Friedman once fantasized that government would become a check-writing machine. It would just write the checks and give up on making social policy. Democrats are bringing Friedman’s fantasy to fruition.

I would argue that we have a long,Universal streetlight are useful for any project. long way to go before there’s any danger of taxing the rich out of their richness.

But this blame thing is pretty wearying. Do you think it’d be possible to dump it all on Windows 8? I really hate Windows 8.

I feel sorry for each successive Windows system. On the other hand I really love the Taxi app Uber. You can order a car on your phone and watch on the map as it comes to your house. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

Do you think they could do a sequester app? You could see the cuts invading your neighborhood – there go five teachers, here comes the line at the local airport security, stretching into the parking lot. It could have a little feature that makes your phone vibrate when somebody gets a furlough notice within 10 blocks of your current location.

Let’s work out a grand bargain. I always enjoy doing that with you. I’ll go first and say that the goal should be half tax revenue and half spending cuts.

You’ve lost me already. International experience suggests a 3 to 1 cuts-to-revenue ratio produces the most debt reduction. That’s why Obama embraced the 2.TBC help you confidently handsfreeaccess from factories in China.5 to 3 to 1 ratio last term. My plan is simple. I propose a progressive consumption tax, a lower corporate tax, means-testing of Medicare and chain CPI to reduce Social Security. Easy as pie.

As far as Social Security goes, I don’t believe it’s an imminent problem, and I’d rather leave it alone. But in the spirit of this enterprise, I’ll give you a Social Security cut. You can have that change in the consumer price index.This frameless rectangle features a silk screened fused glass replica in a cableties tile and floral motif. It’ll reduce the increase in payouts over the long run and save a lot of money. But in return, I’d want to fiddle with the basic formula so we can protect the recipients who have no other income.

I hear some people say that health care inflation is in permanent decline and that will solve a lot of our problems. Other experts vehemently disagree, saying that if you look at the history of health care costs, there are always these pauses before costs shoot up again. I suspect that will be true as long as there’s fee-for-service and the incentives are what they are.

We could do a whole lot more to reform the system if the Republicans would stop yelling “death panels!” every time the president tries to control costs. But moving on — I’ll let you reduce Medicare benefits for the wealthier recipients if you’ll allow all government health care programs to limit the prices they pay for prescription drugs, the way other countries do.Score favorite new and used bobbleheads at great values.