Nobody gets it. I mean nobody.  Just when you think that some fiscal sanity might return to Washington, DC with the huge democratic backslap the electorate gave Obama in December, the Republican Party proves it is just as out of touch as the Democrats.  The House Appropriations first stab at trimming the budget yielded a deal with $40 billion in cuts.  With the current deficit at $1.4 trillion, that is only a 2.8% cut.  Hello? Are you kidding me?  That’s like a doctor putting a Band-Aid on a pricked finger, but failing to address the slit neck and jugular vein.  The patient is still going to die. 

America is the patient.  She is hemorrhaging from multiple self-inflicted wounds brought on by her fiscal insanity.  The appropriate treatment?  Every single wound needs to be closed and the patient needs to be put in a rubber room without any sharp objects until she regains her sanity.  

The question is what can be defined as a cut? That’s an easy one – any spending that isn’t explicitly called out in the Constitution.  Ask yourself, if the federal Department of Education shut down today, would your children go uneducated?  If the NEA locked up, would there still be art?  If Housing and Urban Development went the way of the dinosaurs, would our cities suddenly fall apart?  If the Department of Labor was reduced 75%, would we suddenly find ourselves in the 1920s with labor and management in a bitter struggle?  I don’t think so.  But based on just those cuts, that would reduce the deficit by about only $250 billion.  But when Hal Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is worried that deep cuts to the federal budget would result in layoffs of federal employees, you have to realize that even the Republicans don’t get it.

So what!  Why are federal employees more special than the employees in any other industry?  During this economic “downtown” layoffs have occurred in many industries.  According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, in October 2010, there were 351 mass layoffs in the manufacturing sector alone resulting in about 40,000 jobs lost.  That’s in addition to the 108,000 jobs lost across other sectors including construction, retail sales, administrative, waste services and accommodation and food services.  Why should the federal employees be immune to the same economic effects the rest of us are susceptible to?  If government is too big, which most moderate to conservative Republicans will freely admit, how else are we going to reduce it in size without job losses in the public sector?  It’s got to happen sooner or later, or the patient is going to die on the table.  The sooner the better.