The sequester is terrible, yes, but the timing may help us.
It may bcome the American public's lesson in understanding the danger that slashing budgets presents to the economic health of our nation. Because there are meat cleaver cuts about to happen, the damage they cause might be obvious to more people, including Republicans. Cuts will be out there in the open, to things like Air Traffic Control and the Military - instead of only those that cause stealth pain to those who have no real voice in Washington. Even the Republican Right will eventually want to revisit the sequester cuts, hoping to make the poor shoulder more of the impact in a final deal.
It has always been the pending "Grand Bargain" that I feared the most, because that one will be for keeps, virtually impossible to reverse once those budget cuts are set in motion. If that mega deal had made it across the table before anyone had time to feel the pain, it might have delivered the middle class, working class, and poor to a bleak place, potentially for decades. Now though the news is all about how bad the sequester cuts will be to our economic health - how it could push us back into recession etc. Let that register with the public now and maybe we can actually come close to getting it right when it really counts, in the later deal or deals.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The effects of most of the cuts won't be evident until April, so you will see them quietly kick the can down the road shortly before that happens, and do no kind of tax raising or budget deal with President Obama at all. You heard it here first!
(In the remote instance that they do not do the above, it will definitely redound to our benefit :-D)
