Cut spending from the bottom up

It is hard to believe that Americans could have so much common sense, and their government could have so little, but that seems to be the case.

Consider the curious case of the sequestration stalemate.

Regarding the across-the-board cutbacks in federal spending that are supposed to go into effect Friday, both the White House and members of Congress are voicing the most theatrical admonitions ever seen in a town long famous for its histrionics.

The sky, we are told, is falling — and the only thing for folks like us to do is decide whether to blame the Democrats or the Republicans for the doom which we are about to receive.

Nonsense!

Let’s be plain about it — if there is a general panic that ensues as a result of the spending reductions coming to the bloated federal government, it will be a result of the political posturing of President Obama and members of Congress, not because Americans are too selfish to tighten their belts in a crisis.

And a spending crisis we do have. When it is normal practice for the federal government to spend one-fourth more than it has on hand in revenues, then that is a crisis by anyone’s standards. In 2013, we are delightfully going to ONLY have a deficit of $900 billion out of total spending of $3.8 trillion. Yep, that’s an improvement, but it is still horrendous by anyone’s real world standards. Only in Washington, D.C., can politicians proudly allocate billions and billions of dollars they don’t have, and then go home and feel good about themselves. Anywhere else, these financial wizards would be in jail, and the rest of us could feel good about justice being served.

Let’s not forget, this sequestration process which both Republicans and Democrats are now decrying was the invention of those very same Republicans and Democrats. That adds an element of hypocrisy to the political posturing that really rankles.

Now, as to the common-sense solution that is obvious to everyone who doesn’t live in the Beltway: Cut spending from the bottom up; not from the top down.

Only an idiot would cut the most important programs that affect national security, public safety and our country’s future well-being. That being the case, we have to conclude that the sequestration is a tale told by an idiot.

Instead of furloughing federal workers from its mammoth work force, the Department of Homeland Security is furloughing illegal immigrants who have been detained while awaiting deportation.

Closer to home, Glacier Park gets a $250,000 federal grant from the Department of Transportation to buy a couple of extra buses while that same department is threatening to close down the airport tower at Glacier Park International.

The president’s former chief of staff was famous for saying a politician should never let a good crisis go to waste, and President Obama has certainly taken that dictum to heart. He has forecast so many catastrophes that will befall us on March 1 that you could be forgiven for thinking that the Mayans only got the end of the world wrong by a couple of months. Teachers fired! Meat uninspected! Flights grounded! National security compromised! Eek!

But here’s the awful, ugly truth. Although the cuts are made across the board, there is no requirement that they have to be implemented by making the cuts as painful as possible. That is just political extortion by the executive branch, which seems to think that if the cuts are painful enough, the country will somehow approve tax increases.

Stop! Mr. President, the entire country knows that the federal bureaucracy is too big — across the board. There is waste and there is lack of accountability. Demand that our civil servants do more with less — just like private-sector employees have been doing for the past five years!

It can be done. Back in 2010, Montana’s then-governor, Brian Schweitzer, ordered all his executive branch directors to cut their general-fund budgets by 5 percent, and he gave them less than three weeks to do so. Oddly enough, when ordered to find cuts, they did so.

President Obama has to find a reasonable way to rein in spending. This isn’t a game, and there is no way the United States can continue to spend money on endless feel-good projects just because they are popular. We need to get real, and we need to do it now.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.