When austerity addicts overdose the world will change

Riffing off Sam Stein, Greg Sargent flags the disconnect inside the Beltway bubble between the Villagers view of the sequester and the reality of the cuts on the streets. The insiders are all about who's winning the optics game and hurling themselves en masse onto the fainting couches about the cancelled White House tours. The outsiders, meaning the vast majority of the population, have greater concerns that are finally showing up on their local news stations.

Most people haven't paid attention because they're bored with the endless Congressional theatrics that so obsesses the national media. Nobody told them what the sequester was going to do to in their town. That's changing.

But this local coverage tells a different story with a different emphasis. Real people around the country are beginning to tune into the possibility that these spending cuts could do real damage to their communities and to the country’s economic recovery.

The sequester cuts are only just beginning to filter down tangibly enough to disrupt the daily lives of the unengaged masses. And they will be widely felt. Think Progress assembled The 32 Dumbest And Most Devastating Sequester Cuts. I picked out 10 of them.

$75 million cut from the Aging and Disability Services Programs
$199 million cut from public housing
$928 million cut from FEMA’s disaster relief money
$125 million cut from the Wildland Fire Management
$53 million cut from Salaries and Expenses at the Food Safety and Inspection Service
$57 million cut from the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control
$633 million cut from the Department of Education’s Special Education programs
$512 million cut from Customs and Border Protection
$79 million cut from Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance
$232 million cut from the Federal Aviation Administration

These cuts aren't just going to be felt by the poors and the olds. They're going to greatly inconvenience the reasonably secure. When the spending cuts start bleeding already underfunded local budgets and reversing a still sluggish economic recovery, the people will not be amused.

Austerity addicts have yet to feel the bite of public opinion. There will be backlash and I'm pretty sure it will fall on the Republicans much more heavily than on Obama or the Democrats.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for linking in at Crooks and Liars blog round up.]