April Fool’s Day is an important date for reporting on the meat ax cuts to federal spending resulting from the 2011 sequestration deal that President Obama proposed in the belief no one would let it actually happen. The sequestration technically began March 1, but many federal employees are covered by agreements requiring 30 days’ notice before furloughs and layoffs, making April 1 a key date, as will be the days and weeks ahead.
You would not know that, however, from reading the news columns of three of the Big Five newspapers over the weekend. By my searching, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and USA Today offered no news coverage of sequestration-related furloughs going into effect (though the LA Times did run this online map Monday showing federal contracts and salaries as a percent of each state’s economy, giving a vague sense of how the budget cuts would be apportioned).
The Washington Post, for its part, gave prominent page-one treatment Monday to how meat inspection was spared from cuts in an informing piece by David A. Farenthold and Lisa Rein that made a powerful point about politics, if not sound policy. Wrote Farenthold and Rein:
There’s a story there, about how power and lobbying can still make money appear in Washington, even in this age of austerity. It started with sharp political theater. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack insisted that the sequester would force him to shut down all U.S. meat production on at least 11 days.
The inspectors union didn’t believe that. Neither did many in the powerful meat lobby. But they were too worried not to help Vilsack anyway. After an extensive campaign, the Senate gave Vilsack the money.
So the sequester can be hacked. Now, other interest groups are waiting: police officers, airport executives, Border Patrol agents. The question is: Can it be hacked again?
Government Executive Magazine provided one answer to that question on Friday. Eric Katz reported that the border agents union was told that “its members would not face furloughs, but the details are still being negotiated and nothing is final” because of “a stopgap spending bill President Obama signed into law Tuesday. The continuing resolution kept the across-the-board cuts in place, but provided extra funding to the Homeland Security Department—CBP’s parent agency—to ease the impact on border security.”
As for The Wall Street Journal, it ran a piece on A5 Monday about the effects of budget cuts in Baltimore, one of the poorest and most troubled cities in America. Reporter Elizabeth Williamson, in Monday morning’s print edition, began with this lede:
The sequester, the series of federal budget cuts that went into effect March 1, remains for many in this city a theoretical concept.
But just a few lines later, Williamson reported that the cuts were very real indeed. The Y of Central Maryland’s Head Start, a federally funded program to help poor children get a shot at success in grammar school, had its funding cut $250,000 or 5 percent, according to John Hoey, the agency’s president. The Y, Williamson wrote:
has cut unfilled positions and is thinking about asking teachers to help serve lunch or double as bus attendants. In the past, Baltimore County’s wealthy residents have donated funds to help fill gaps in federal funding, and he hopes that will happen again. “The sky won’t fall,” Mr. Hoey said.
Imagine if Senators and Representatives had to make their own photocopies or just personally sign all the letters they mail using their franking privilege? More work for the same pay is not a “theoretical” concept. Nor is reliance on donations rather than funding for vulnerable children.
Then there is the effect on the FBI, per Williamson:
the Baltimore FBI office’s staff of 400—who cover Maryland and Delaware—remain on the job but somewhat in the dark about coming furloughs. “As far as I know, it’s every employee [and] one day off per pay period,” said FBI spokesman Richard Wolf of furloughs expected in May. “And when I say we’ve been told that, I don’t know if I’ve officially been told that.”
The use of the words cuts and austerity, in this case, is journalistic and political fraud. The slowing of an annual spending increase is not a "cut." Besides, the fewer inflationary "dollars" and unproductive "jobs" going to the "public" (govt/coercive) sector, the better.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 1 Apr 2013 at 06:51 PM
@ Dan,
I think you are mixing concepts. The budgets are being cut. Each was going to spend X and now must spend x-minus-sequester. Fewer crimes will be investigated, Head Start workers will make less.
BTW, many government jobs are highly productive, while many private sector jobs are not. School teachers, for example, add enormous economic value. So do public health workers, snow plow drivers and research scientists. But tax shelter creators, private sector workers all, are a classic example of unproductive private sector (and sometimes criminal) work.
On your other point, spending that appears to grow when measured in nominal collars can actually be shrinking -- and in more than one way.
If total spending grows by 2%, but inflation is 3% than real spending declines by 1 percentage point.
Measured per capita -- because the population is growing -- even a 4% spending increase would mean a real cut in per capita spending (though not all costs are affected equally population growth -- education and Social Security more than military).
The same is true with incomes and revenue, what is nominally more can actually be less.
For example, inflation-adjusted federal income, corporate income and Social Security/Medicare tax revenues fell after the GWBush tax cuts and when adjusted for population growth fell sharply as you can see in the graphic I created here:
http://www.taxanalysts.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/0971609221721415852572ac0067c130/64db0bd73400a91a85257861004f2a19/$FILE/Table%201.pdf
As for austerity, compared to other modern countries US budgets, other than broadly measured military spending, are austere even before the sequester, as you can determine by getting the "purchasing power parity" or PPP data from the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development at oecd.org to make apples-to-apples comparisons.
To understand how austerity budgets make us poorer please read review the column -- and watch the video -- I created a year ago when I was with Reuters:
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/01/27/the-siren-call-of-austerity/
But journalistic fraud. No.
#2 Posted by David Cay Johnston, CJR on Tue 2 Apr 2013 at 09:53 AM
What journalistic fraud looks like:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15308-senate-unanimously-votes-against-cuts-to-social-security-media-dont-notice
"Switching the basis for the COLA to the chained CPI is one of the most beloved policies of the Washington elite. The idea is that it would reduce scheduled benefits for retirees by 0.3 percentage points annually. This amounts to a cut of 3 percent after ten years, 6 percent after 20 years, and 9 percent after 30 years...
But the magic of the chained CPI is that everyone gets to run around saying that they are not really cutting benefits, they are just "adjusting" the cost of living formula. And the media do their best to assist the politicians pushing these cuts. They almost always uses euphemisms like "changing" or "restructuring" Social Security, trying to conceal the simple reality that politicians are pushing cuts to the program."
But hey, those cuts in the program per person and per item cost won't be cuts according to Dan math because the actual amount spent won't be reduced.
If you were earning a nickel an hour in the 1920's, you should be able to live on a nickel per hour today. Your boss wouldn't have cut his labor costs, he's would have just frozen them for eighty years. Cuts, in the world of Dan, mean reductions in numbers, not reductions in value.
And this is why we can pretend we haven't been repressing wages for over 30 years. It's not like wages have been cut or fallen 'numerically'.
It's just that things are 'some how' different:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/your-helpful-charts-o-day.html
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 3 Apr 2013 at 12:15 PM