“We’re doing it in the worst possible way,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s the total inverse of smart budget consolidation.”
Investment Blocked
The paralysis embodied by sequestration will prevent the U.S. from investing in research, infrastructure and worker retraining as other countries are doing, Kirkegaard said.
In areas of the budget that are being hit hardest, the cuts will be seen over the next decade.
“They’re focusing on the wrong deficit issues,” said William Gale, a senior fellow at Brookings, who says more needs to be done to address structural, long-term deficits. “They’re reducing the deficits that happen to be good deficits and they’re not doing anything about the deficits in the future that happen to be bad deficits.”
Since 2010, deficit reduction has dominated political discourse in Washington, contributing to a near-constant atmosphere of crisis and yielding an uneven approach.
“We’ve just have failed to do the work, and that leads us from one needless crisis to another,” Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said yesterday on the Senate floor.
Recurring Deadlines
Republicans and Democrats disagree over how fast the deficit should shrink and how to accomplish that goal. Few U.S. lawmakers challenge the idea that the budget gap is an urgent problem, and even those who do are confronted with recurring deadlines that drive Congress back to deficit cutting.
As a result, governing in the U.S. today is a competition for dwindling future resources, and congressional proposals are measured against the yardstick of how much they cut the deficit.