Slow motion disaster

The only sensible thing to do at this late hour would be to just cancel the stupid sequester. But this is D.C. so it's going to happen because, crackpot cons need a Potemkin victory to please the angry rubes back home. GOPers are betting they can pin it on Obama, but the polling says otherwise. A vast majority, even among unengaged voters, know who to blame for the sequester. It won't be Obama.

The problem is, though it's being spun as a world shattering disaster, the effects won't be immediately apparent to regular people who don't depend on government paychecks. But if it's allowed to linger, the effect on government services people do depend on (yet take for granted) in their daily lives will become increasingly apparent. Oddly, this is the silver lining in the sequester madness:

If the economy sputters as a result of the spending cuts, as some economists predict, deficit reduction will look even worse. An already frustrated workforce will become even more angry, and likely take out their frustration on a Republican Party that has been insisting deficit reduction should be the nation's short-term goal, rather than stimulating the economy.

Conservatives will suffer as the focus of congressional debate will quickly shift from the issue of spending cuts, where the emphasis has been since 2011, to the issue of spending more.

In other words it exposes the fraudulence of the entire premise of conservative economic theory. If it accomplishes that much, maybe it will be worth it. Unfortunately, by the time that happens, our economic recovery will be set back, increasing the already significant suffering of the under and unemployed, the poors and the olds. It will not only arrest forward progress, it will probably kick us back into another recession.

Not that our wealthy overlords care. They make their money either way. [graphic via]