The Press Herald should be embarrassed by the lead editorial Feb. 23 (“Our View: House Republicans created sequester crisis“).

First, as shown on various videos, President Obama created the sequester. He further stated that he would accept no bill that eliminated the sequester cuts. The Republicans simply accepted the concept.

Let’s look at the impact of the sequester. It would require about a 2 percent decrease in the federal government’s expenditures. In most cases, the resulting budget would still be more than last year’s.

How serious is a 2 percent reduction? Just ask every wage earner in this country. Their wages were just reduced by that same percentage because of the Social Security tax increase. Did this cause the sky to fall?

The president and his Cabinet are all shouting that the republic will fail if sequestration happens.

Children will no longer be fed; planes will not be able to land; aircraft carriers will not be able to deploy; our borders will become porous (huh?). We are told that most of the cuts would be to services that impact the public. All of this from a 2 percent budget reduction in a bloated federal budget that increases every year.

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Any intelligent budget manager would tell you that you don’t look at mission-critical functions to effectively cut budgets.

It would be interesting to ask agency heads why they can no longer provide the same services they have been providing for years. They have, in most cases, more money this year than last, and more money last year than the year before that.

It is worth quoting George Will’s Feb. 25 column (“The sequester: Yet another crisis manufactured by liberalism“) on the subject of synthetic hysteria: “It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying ‘Wolf!’ about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying ‘Hamster!’ “

Allan Brockman is a resident of Buxton.


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