Don’t Forget Sequestration

by Stuart Shapiro

In a week when House Republicans showed their hatred for the Food Stamps program and thoughts have begun to turn toward the next GOP-driven hostage crisis to get more spending cuts, it is important to remember the results of the last one . . . sequestration.  Kathleen Geier catalogs some of them:

Consider the following:

— At least 70,000 kids are being kicked out of the already chronically underfunded preschool program, Head Start.

— Elderly folks and people with disabilities who depend on Meals on Wheels are also in for an unlovely surprise: funding for the program has been slashed, and thousands of people across the country are receiving fewer meals from the service — or no meals whatsoever.

— Public schools across the country that depend on federal aid, especially those located on military bases and Indian reservations, are finding themselves forced to lay off workers, cut back hours, and postpone vital repairs to crumbling infrastructure.

— Small businesses, many of which supply goods and services to the government, have been hard hit, and a number of them have been forced to lay off workers because their federal contracts were cancelled.

— The long-term unemployed, whose unemployment benefits were painfully inadequate to begin with (on average, only $289 a week), are also getting reamed. Weekly benefits are shrinking by amounts ranging from 14 percent to 22 percent, depending on what part of the country recipients live in.

And what did we get for all this? Budget deficits that were coming down anyway are coming down a bit faster?  Hard to think it is even close to worth it.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.