Eek! A fiscal crisis! Quick, lay off the firefighters!

For some time I have speculated on how long it would be before the Obama administration would resort to strategies that are more nefarious in their attempt to scare the public into blaming the Republicans for any negative results of the sequester.

This concern presented itself last week by the action of Homeland Security. They announced that they would be releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants held in local jails. These criminals had been jailed for various criminal offenses. The first wave of those releases, according to Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu, was 500 detainees in his county alone.

Who do you suppose will be blamed if any of these released criminal illegals commit more serious or heinous crimes? Sheriff Babeu said, “The safety of the public is threatened and the rule of law discarded as a political tactic in this sequester battle.” ICE officials are refusing to divulge the total number of prisoners that will be released.

This is a step up from the dire warnings that firefighters, first responders, and teachers would experience cuts. First, most of these jobs are paid for by local taxes and not by the federal government. Even so, why should any federal agency be required to do anything more than trim around the edges in order to accomplish a 2.4 percent cut in each agency’s spending. After all, taxpayers were expected to do with less when payroll taxes were increased by 2 percent at the beginning of 2013. Higher wage earners were expected to do with even less of their earnings, beginning in 2013.

These same sort of scare tactics are not new to this president’s repertoire of strategies. Remember when he threatened to hold up Social Security checks to seniors if Congress did not extend the debt limit? He knows he cannot use this threat this time because Social Security and Medicaid are both exempt along with veterans’ benefits and food stamps.

Therefore, he has to threaten air-traffic control and the TSA cuts, creating travel interruptions. However, couldn’t the president simply ask for a voluntary 2.4 percent across the board cut by these agencies without causing hardships on either the agencies or the traveler? We cannot forget the fact that a congressional report “found that TSA is wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.”

Another report found that the TSA “has continually grown its ranks despite fewer travelers.” They were found to have purchased and stored millions of dollars worth (5,700 pieces) of equipment that was not being utilized by the agency. Some of this equipment was found to be ineffective and unusable after being purchased. One reason given for the bloated inventory was they had purchased more than they needed to get a discount, and then paid thousands of dollars annually to store unused equipment.

We should be able to extrapolate from this information that many other agencies have been equally, if not more, careless in their spending habits and could cut 2.4 percent from their expenditures. After all, we were told that to fund Obamacare they could find ways of cutting waste and fraud from Medicare to the tune of $716 billion. By some estimates, the sequester is set to cut $110 billion in domestic and defense spending. Those cuts in Medicare alone are 6.5 times more than the $110 billion.

Would someone please explain to me how, even after the sequester, this country could spend $15 billion more in 2013 than was spent in 2012 and seriously declare that the sky is falling? In an American Enterprise article, Phil Gramm pointed out that spending on discretionary and defense programs would be 19.2 percent and 13.8 percent higher respectively than it was in 2007.

Has the average American taxpayer’s spending increased this much during the same time period? With interest rates set below 1 percent by the Federal Reserve and with inflation at 3 percent, scores of Americans’ savings have lost value. On top of this, countless necessities purchased by the average American have increased more than 3 percent. According to one ABC report, “Even if the cuts go into effect, the Department of Transportation will still spend more money this year ($73.2 billion) than it spent last year ($72.6 billion).”

Sen. Rand Paul announced he is returning $600,000 from his Senate office budget back to the U.S. Treasury. We need more of his kind of leadership, which is leading by example. If he can be frugal enough to accomplish this kind of savings, surely there are others in leadership positions that could do the same. Perhaps the president could learn a lesson from the senator and avoid spending $181,757 per hour flying around in campaign mode giving speeches to scare people and stay in Washington to help solve problems.

Not only is the president MIA as a leader and problem solver, but the total expense is staggering.

In a presidential debate 33 years ago, Ronald Reagan pointed out, “The old politician’s trick is to cut firefighters and hospitals first.” Thirty-three years later things have not changed a bit.

Lester Still is a resident of Kalispell.