Recent comments

There may be a non-sequitur in the analysis. Yes, it's important to individual House Republicans to appeal to primary voters. Yes, both parties may see control of the House and the most important political contest right now. However, the one does not lead to the other in the causal chain of events leading to sequestration. The transition from your 5th to your 6th paragraph doesn't lead to the conclusion of the 7th. Desperation to hold the House has nothing to do with the power of primary voters to dictate tax policy. The drive to hold the House is intensified because the power of extremists in primary voting puts swing districts at risk. The shift in focus to winning primaries has polarized House politics. The focus on winning control of the House should militate toward compromise.

I think your analysis does identify the ultimate cause of of the failure to avoid sequestration, but with a logical detour along the way.

This is cold comfort to the patients with horrible diseases wondering why the NIH medical research budget has been savaged by these sequester cuts, and to the scientists in medical research labs like mine who are going to be laid off from their jobs soon if the sequester is not reversed.

I have seen pieces on TPM stating that the HR will vote on a seven month CR at FY2012 levels within a week. The sequester will still apply to these expenditures. TPM has also had pieces suggesting the Democrats will accept this, betting everything on taking the House in 2014.

Stan- what are your thoughts on how the continuing resolution deadline will play out? Is there any risk of a government shutdown now that the deficit reduction target has been achieved?

I do not anticipate any kind of a shutdown unless Democrats for some reason want one. Republicans oddly seem realistic about when and how hard they can push their views. Fiscal Cliff: check. Debt ceiling: check. Sequester: looking like a check. What is galling a lot of Dems is that they underestimated how hard Republicans could push and how well they would slip big punches. Yes, there are rounds remaining, but I have the GOP ahead on points, which is a shame since it really is not good for so many people. Still it isn't exactly their job to promoted a more skillful Democratic party.

It is becoming clear that government spending and plans for spending were slowing down quite a bit months in advance of right now (starting in anticipation of the Jan 1 date and then continuing right now). So I would not be incredibly surprised to see the immediate employment effects end up smaller than some may think, since they were already "baked in" starting in December or earlier. That said, if we get an actual shutdown at the end of the month, things could really go down hill pretty fast, since the situation now is much more tenuous than might be estimated currently.

What happens at the end of March when a CR needs to be passed to fund the government through the rest of the year?

There is one thing the marines bring. The president is in charge of the marines and does not need congressional approval for sending the marines out for a period of time. The other branches, congress can block their deployment.

Seriously? The entire economic situation would be resolved in three months if the Senate, House, and President gave their powers to academic scientists in the social, economic, and physical sciences. It would be simply a matter of optimization and measurement, and the whole matter would be done with. No hard feelings, no weird agendas, just one gigantic optimization with long-term economic and social health as priority.

When I decided to invest summer earnings in the stocks this winter, I did not forsee that there would not be enough brains and balls in politics to figure out what is right in a logical way. Instead, I see a bunch of intellectually deprived !@#!@#$s literally running an ideological crusade.

I suspect that the self described Republicans wouldn't like airport user fees, but Republican politcal operatives might. They like shifting the tax burden, especially when it isn't decribed as a tax.

I am not sure the administration really has any choice in the matter. There is no flexibility in the cuts and they are supposed to go down to a very low level in the budget process. Thus, there will be 8% or so less funds to pay air traffic controllers. Their pay can't be cut, and so they will have to work 8% less.

To paraphrase a seasoned politician from long ago:

"Don't cut you, don't cut me, cut that man behind the tree."

Any spending that benefits someone else is wasteful spending but any spending [tax expenditures included] that benefits me is a crucial investment in the public good.

On a personal level, whenever my associates complain about wasteful spending, I tend to bring up the Marine Corp, a expensive and redundant branch of the armed services. The Marines have not stormed a hostile beach since June 1950, 63 years ago. There is little or nothing that the Corp does that the other other branches do not also do. In fact, Robert Gates commented in 2010 that the Army had become just like the Marines and the Marines had become just like the Army.