Opinion

Apocalypse cancelled

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It’s been four months since the world came to an end — by which I mean, the budgetary “sequester” that cut federal spending across the board went into effect.

Remember the sequester? It was going to be a nightmare, a horror show, the worst thing that ever happened. People would die in the streets, our defenses would be mangled, the elderly would starve, the poor would be evicted.

After all, 47% of Americans receive some form of government assistance, subsidy or benefit. Wouldn’t across-the-board cuts in federal spending end up hurting a large number of them? Wouldn’t the pain lead to fear and upset and rage, cause protests and bring Washington to its knees?

Those were the questions before March, when it came into being. Now that it’s July, the only real question is: What if they gave a sequester and nobody cared?

In 1985, a senator from Texas named Phil Gramm designed a piece of legislation aimed at getting the federal budget under control. One of its features was something called a “sequester” — an automatic across-the-board spending cut that would hack at government programs and agencies, the good and the bad alike.

The sequester was deliberately crude in design so that the mere threat of its implementation would force Congress to work responsibly together on budgetary matters to avoid it. Gramm himself famously called the sequester “a bad idea whose time has come.”

It turned out the law was poorly designed as a constitutional matter, was thrown out by the courts and then was passed anew in a defanged form. The first sequester did go into effect, but it was offset by explosive economic growth that poured tax revenue into the government’s coffers. And by the time the law returned the next year, the urgency was gone and Congress found ways around the sequester.

That bad idea whose time had come? It went.

That was, until the summer of 2011, when the Republican House decided to take a stand on runaway Washington spending by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. At the last minute, a deal was made to kick the can down the road — first by a few months and then past the 2012 elections — with the addition of the sequester at the White House’s urging.

Once again, as was the case in the 1980s, the prospect of this catastrophe — call it a budgetary “sharknado” — was supposedly the only way to prevent the catastrophe from happening. Why? Because the consequences would be so dire that the mere contemplation of them would force Congress to act responsibly in tandem with the president to reduce the size of the federal deficit.

It was as though Washington had turned itself into both the gunman and the hostage, pointing a revolver at its own head and saying, “Back off or I get it.”

“There will be no easy off-ramps on this one,” said Barack Obama in 2011 when some hoped he would work to kill off the automatic budget cuts his White House had insisted on adding to a compromise budget deal with the GOP. Obama, the big-government guy, hated the sequester because of the pain it would supposedly cause — but without the threat of the pain, how could liberals and conservatives come together?

In any case, should they fail to come together, that was supposed to work for Obama too. Or so the operative Democratic theory went. The Republican insistence on cutting the deficit without raising taxes would be the cause of the automatic slicing, and so nobody would blame the Obamans and everybody would blame the GOP. Advantage: Obama and the Democrats.

After all, there was fairly recent evidence the public didn’t like that sort of thing. The government shutdown in 1995, the result of a showdown between the Republican Party and Bill Clinton over the growth of entitlements, proved so damaging to the GOP that it sued for peace after only three weeks — and made Newt Gingrich and the Republicans on Capitol Hill look like crazed ideologues.

So, more than a year and a half after it became law, the sequester went into effect at the beginning of March.

And the public has yawned. So have journalists, even liberal journalists. The Huffington Post was trying to make a federal case of it, but after a yeoman effort to detail the supposedly parlous results of the sequester, it seems to have given up.

Why did the public yawn in 2013, when in 1995 the public reacted so badly to the government shutdown?

The ’95 shutdown was genuinely dramatic; national parks were shuttered, government offices closed. The general course of things had been disrupted in an unprecedented manner.

Fresh from a huge midterm victory in 1994, Republicans thought this might work in their favor, because they believed people were as hostile to government as they were.

That proved to be a miscalculation, and the public made it clear it wanted things to work better, not to go dark altogether.

This year, nothing changed from the day before the implementation of the sequester to the day after. Indeed, the prophets of doom look pretty silly right now.

We were told the US Geologic Survey would have to shut off 350 gauges that help to predict floods. Didn’t happen; it just limited the numbers of conferences its officials could attend. We were told 2,500 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the hurricane predictors — would have to be furloughed. Didn’t happen. We were told prison guards would be furloughed. Didn’t happen. And the Department of Homeland Security, the Washington Post reported, “cut $7.8 million for a grant program that helped prepare for disasters. But it told Congress that this program had $36 million waiting in the bank” anyway.

There may be some long-term issues; will some programs run out of money before the end of the year? And given that half of the cuts are in the defense budget, will our military’s readiness be affected?

But this has been an instructive exercise nonetheless. Some Republicans with long memories have been operating under the assumption that it is dangerous for them to play hardball on the budget and taxes because they saw how disastrously the showdown went.

The fact that there has been no sequester blowback changes every calculation the Republican House will make from here on in. It strengthens the hand of the Tea Partiers and will to more confrontation this year and next as we approach the 2014 elections.

The bad idea whose time didn’t come in the 1980s has come around again and it doesn’t look like such a bad idea after all.

jpodhoretz@gmail.com