Or, the word Rachel Maddow won’t say.  It’s going to happen, I think.  Neither side seems interested in even talking about not doing it.  We’re going to be stuck with it, and with the consequences of it.  And not only is it stupid, both sides seem to agree on how stupid it is. If you want to understand where American politics is, right now, look no further than the sequester.

The Washington Post had rather a nice article explaining what it’s all about.  Basically, it goes back to 2011, when the House threatened to not raise the debt ceiling.  As part of the compromise reached to get us out of that mess, the Budget Control Act provided for a super-committee to come up with some budget compromises that would reduce the deficit and debt.  To further incentivize that committee, the BCA also came up with the sequester; a series of budget cuts so draconian and so damaging and idiotic, that nobody could possibly wish for them to happen.  Republicans hate cuts to Defense, so half the sequester cuts are in Defense spending–Democrats hate cuts in domestic spending, so half the cuts are in discretionary domestic spending.  Read the Post article–it’s got lots of specifics about what’s going to be cut and where.  Military families will lose benefits.  It could cost about 2 million jobs–or maybe fewer than that.

Economists all basically agree that this will hurt the US economy, and could send us back into recession.  The CBO thinks it will reduce GDP by 1.5%.  It will also have almost no effect on the deficit.  It will contract the economy enough to counter-act any budget savings.

Most economists think it’s going to be devastating.  Stephen Fuller thinks it’s going to be more devastating than other economists do.  Paul Krugman thinks that any Grand Bargain, based on Simpson-Bowles, which might head off the sequester, would probably do about as much damage as the sequester itself; PK has been pretty grumpy about it all, which is why his blog lately has mostly focused on Europe and the damaging effects of austerity.

So once again, every three months, regular as Exlax, Washington is in emergency mode.  It’s a CRISIS.  But it’s worth pointing out that this sequester crisis is entirely self-inflicted, completely artificial.  Most of the time, emergencies are things that happen unexpectedly to us.  My kid’s sick: that’s an emergency.  I was in a car accident: emergency.  A comet’s about to collide with Earth: international crisis.

This isn’t.  This is something Congress and the White House did to themselves.  It was an effort to force people who have no interest in compromising to compromise.  It was intended to incentivize behavior folks are otherwise disinclined to engage in.

It’s as though I were to say “I’m too fat.  So I’m going to give away ten dollars everytime I eat dessert.” Now, it’s six months later, and I’m broke.  So I say, “I have to rob a bank.  I’m broke.”  Thing is, I don’t actually have to rob that bank.  I could stop eating dessert.  But I’m not going to do that. I like dessert. Or, the other thing I could do would be to stop giving my money away.  I mean, it was just a deal I made with myself.  I could just decide to not do it anymore.

But the sequester is likely to happen.  Neither party seems willing to even consider negotiating the settlement that would head off this deadline.  And both parties seem to think that this sequester nonsense will be so unpopular with folks that they can gain political advantage by blaming it on the other side.  Democrats can say ‘hey, this is something forced upon our nation by Republican intransigence.  They would never accept a balanced approach.’  (That’s code for tax increases.)  Republicans can say ‘this was the President’s idea.  Forced upon us by the pig-headed stubbornness of Obama.  He would never admit that the real problem is his spending spree.’  (That’s code for cutting domestic spending).  And think of the nifty ads both sides will be able to run in 2014, for the midterm elections!  Oh, joy!  Imagine how fun television is going to be to watch two years from now!

I actually have a solution for the sequester, though.  Here’s my idea.  Drum roll please!

Don’t do it.

Congress created this problem, and they can just as easily make it go away.  Just pass a bill rescinding the Budget Control Act.  Straight up and down vote.

And here’s what’s infuriating–that vote will never happen.

It’s the simple, easy and obvious solution to an entirely artificial and unnecessary and idiotic crisis.  Just let Congress vote to rescind.  The sequester is damaging.  It will hurt our economy. No one wants it, and no one ever did.  There is zero political support for the sequester.  No one is lobbying for it.  No one, on either side, likes anything about it.

So make it go away.  Vote now, today, tomorrow, immediately.

But Harry Reid will not call for such a vote in the Senate, and John Boehner will not call for such a vote in the House.  And there’s no enthusiasm among the rank-and-file membership of either body for such a vote.  Both sides think that the voters will punish anyone who votes against cuts in federal spending, because both sides have convinced the voters that the deficit and debt are the biggest problems our country faces right now.  That’s actually not true, but both sides have jumped on the ‘cut spending’ bandwagon.  And both sides think they’ll look stupid if they vote against a cut in spending, even a dumb one.  Which this one is.

The sequester is bi-partisan lunacy on the grandest of scales.  It’s completely stupid, completely avoidable, and completely inevitable.  No wonder Congress’ approval ratings are lower than Paris Hilton’s.

Last March, my wife and I were identity thefted.  In other words, somebody filed for a sizeable tax refund, using our name and identity.  We reported it, refiled our taxes, provided enough information that hopefully they caught the guy.  We were told that we would not be able to e-file.  In fact, we won’t be able to e-file for the next five years.  Annoying, but okay, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.  No big deal.  So we filled out the tax form, sent it in, and should get a refund, though not as lucrative as the refund our thief got, the slimeball.  The IRS told us to be patient, that it could take a few months to get our refund.  Should expect it sometime in September or October.  It’s now February.  Still haven’t gotten it.  We’re going to be filing our taxes in the next week or so, despite the fact that we still haven’t gotten last year’s taxes dealt with.  But the IRS keeps losing budget.  They’re undermanned.  We need to be patient–that’s what the woman told me last week when I called in, after waiting on hold for two hours and twenty five minutes.

Big story last week–Rachel Maddow had it, so did NBC, so did Salon.  The VA takes basically forever to process veterans’ disability claims.  I don’t mean weeks; I mean years.  Right now it takes an average of two years for the Veterans Administration to process a disability claim.  They’re transitioning to a paper-less system, they say. The new system is kinda buggy.  Plus, you know, budget cuts.  Don’t have enough people to do the job.

Gun control’s a big issue right now, and there’s talk of having a national database of gun owners–that you’d have to register any new gun purchases.  That national database would be administered by ATF–the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  But if that legislation were to pass, the ATF isn’t sure how they’d be able to do it.  They’ve had a hiring freeze since, like, 1985.  Keep losing budget.  They haven’t even had a director for seven years.

Have a friend who’s an acquisitions officer for Hill Air Force Base.  He says that his job is essentially impossible.  His job is to get officers the things they need to do their jobs.  He can’t do it, though, because of budget cuts.  He has no idea what will happen if and when the sequester hits.  Shoot himself, he said wryly.

Love Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift.  I know, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, big lefty, biased source, I know the arguments.  But her book is brilliant, thoroughly researched, and without a discernible political agenda.  But the stuff about our nuclear arsenal has the power to keep me up at night, I’ll tell you.  Keeping tabs on our nuclear missiles up there in North Dakota is a rotten job.  The guys who do it are undertrained, poorly paid, and unmotivated.  There just isn’t money for something like that–nuclear security.

Oh, also embassy security. Because when you read the report about Benghazi, one thing jumps out at you–the security there was inadequate.  Still is.  Not surprising–about half of all current US embassies have inadequate security details. Budget cuts.

Without actually running, you know, numbers, let’s look at this sensibly.  The United States spends more on defense than any other nation on earth.  In fact, if you add up the amount spent on defense by the next seventeen nations combined, we still spend more.  Plus, you know, we have a country to run.  We don’t have the kind of social safety net that our European allies have, but we do have big entitlement programs, plus environmental protection, plus federally maintained roads and bridges, plus education assistance, plus border controls and immigration policies, plus a federal justice system, with all those judges and courtrooms and, I don’t know, bailiffs.  National parks.  Air traffic controllers.  Plus plus plus.

Conservatives say they want ‘smaller government.’  Fine.  They also don’t trust the federal government to do much of anything very well.  Plus, they hate taxes.  Hate hate hate taxes.  And the result is that the federal government actually does screw up a lot, filled, as it is, with underpaid, overworked employees constantly being told they have to do more and more with less and less.  In what must be the dispiriting atmosphere in which half the elected officials in government think you shouldn’t even exist, or your job shouldn’t.

But the collection of taxes is an essential government function.  Caring for our veterans: essential.  Providing security for diplomats abroad, completely essential.  Guarding and maintaining nuclear missiles?  OMG.  Is there a word beyond essential?

And they want to cut?  Seriously, more cuts?

I know this isn’t popular.  But it’s time we faced a central reality.  We Americans are seriously undertaxed.  Our government is being compromised by the un-American selfishness of opposing tax increases.  I’m sorry that this is sort of a rant.  And I can think of some golf courses in Guam that could go, if you want to talk about cutting military spending.  But the real problem is not spending.  It’s not.  It’s undertaxation.

So let me meet my conservative friends half-way.  Let’s have a serious conversation about government.  Let’s agree to increase funding for essential functions, even if that means raising taxes.  And sure, maybe there’s a little fat still to trim. I doubt there’s much, though.

But let’s start with the VA.  I’ll make a serious proposal. Let’s increase funding in the VA sufficient to hire enough claims processors.  The goal–to cut the time to process a disability claim from two years to, say, a week.  And here’s how we fund it.  With a tax increase.  Whaddya say?

Arguing economics on the internet is a futile and foolish venture.  I really don’t know why I bother sometimes. Especially since I have no credentials to flaunt: I’m not an economist, heavens knows.  But I have read some.  And honestly the things some people say. . . .

Paul Krugman’s even gotten himself in the middle of a kerfuffle, entirely without intending to.  The Wikipedia article on Austrian-school economics, has at times both included-and-not-included a paragraph citing Krugman’s criticism of the Austrians.  Salon’s got the story, but it’s not hard to imagine it; Austrian-school economics fans play, ahem, some tenacious D.  One hardy perennial is the notion that the world-wide financial crisis was caused by foolish government policies, specifically the Clinton administration’s support for affordable first home purchases.  Yes, it was all the fault of Fanny and Freddy.  Not true, but it’s also a belief that’s all but impossible to refute for people who aren’t interested in evidence.

But another one is the Great Depression.  I mean, the two biggest incidents in the last 100 years of the economy going all kerflooey would be stuff economists would want to get their heads around.  One of my favorite versions of this: FDR followed Keynesian policies.  And they didn’t work, prolonging the Depression.  Facts: Keynes didn’t even finish his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money until 1936.  FDR could hardly have been influenced by it before then.  Keynes did visit America in the middle of the Depression, and he did meet Roosevelt, once, for about an hour, in a conversation Roosevelt, no economist, found deeply baffling. It is true that Keynes admired Roosevelt immensely, but was also pretty critical of a number of New Deal policies. So the ‘New Deal failed because it was Keynesian’ meme is just silly.

Anyway, here’s the latest round:  UCLA economists just published a paper arguing that FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression.  By seven years, no less.

My immediate reaction to this headline was laughter.  Roosevelt was elected in 1932, was inaugurated in ’33.  The Great Depression is generally reckoned as having ended in 1940.  Which means, I figured, that these bozos were saying he should have ended the Great Depression ten minutes after taking office.  Full employment, immediately, presumably involving some kind of spell.

That’s not actually what they’re saying.  They’re saying the Depression ended in 1943, and that sensible (non-stimulative, ergo non-Keynesian) policies would have ended it in 1936.  So their argument isn’t entirely silly.  Just mostly.

Here are the facts that are really not in dispute.  This chart shows  annual US GDP.  Our GDP was 103.6 billion in 1929.  The Depression hit that year, and it shows nicely in this chart: 1930=91.2; 1931=76.5; 1932=58.7; 1933=56.4.  That’s when Roosevelt took office, and the New Deal began.  Check the numbers: 1934=66; 1935=73.3; 1936=83.8; 1937=91.9.  Substantial, steady growth every year.  That was the year that Roosevelt, worried about deficits, cut spending, and look what happened: 1938=86.1; 1939=92.2; 1940=101.4.  In other words, by 1940, the economy had grown to its 1929 levels, more or less.  Hard to look at those figures and conclude that the New Deal failed.

And then came the Second World War, and the economy boomed: 1941=126.7; 1942=161.9; 1943=198.6.  And those last three years, according to these UCLA guys, we were still entangled in the woes of the Great Depression?  With that much economic growth? Seriously?

It is certainly true that the Great Depression New Deal-driven recovery was a low employment recovery.  These two UCLA economists think wages were 25% higher during the Depression than they would have been otherwise, and that the economy was artificially depressed by that same percentage.  They briefly describe the methodology they used to calculate the baseline, the assumptions they base it on, and it’s immediately flawed–union strength was growing during this period, and wages would have risen without the New Deal.  Still, unemployment remained far too high during the  depression, and I don’t question at least some aspects of their analysis, that artificially high wages may have depressed new job creation some.

Roosevelt was not an economist.  His approach, during the Depression, was to try everything, and there can be little doubt that some of his less effective initiatives might have counter-acted his more effective stimulative measures.

But what this UCLA analysis misses is this central point: Roosevelt’s great accomplishment was to save capitalism at all.  That was also Keynes’ great achievement.  In the Cambridge of the 1930s, Keynes learned soon enough that most of his fellow economists had concluded that capitalism as an economic system had run its course, that the events of the Depression had conclusively proved its utter failure. Most of his compatriots had either followed Oswald Mosley into fascism, or the much more numerous young Turks of the profession who had turned to Marxism.

It looked like capitalism had failed.  It looked like market economies had dug their own grave.  Were wages artificially high?  Perhaps, sure.  Because they had to be.  The measures Roosevelt used were necessary, and were resented on the left, because they tended to preserve an economic system that looked to be beyond redemption.This is why Joe McCarthy was able to point to so many commies among people who had come of age in the ’30s. Well, okay, he made a lot of it up–this is Joe McCarthy we’re talking about.  But it’s also true that huge numbers of people found Marxism attractive, because, hey, it’s not like capitalism works.

What this critique of the New Deal ignores is the philosophical and historical realities which the New Deal was forced to address.  Roosevelt, by declaring a bank holiday, saved individual banks.  But more importantly, he saved banking as an idea.

Austrian-style economics insists that any government intervention in the economy is harmful, that if we just leave markets completely alone, they’ll self-correct.  Even if this were true–and it isn’t–it’s not politically possible.  If the economy is slumping, voters will always insist that someone do something about it.  And if wages don’t rise, voters will notice that too.

Besides, has anyone else noticed how similar libertarian economics is to communism?  Both insist that the answer to an economic slump is to do nothing.  Austrians say, do nothing, and the economy will self-correct.  Communists say, do nothing, and it will self-destruct, leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Either way, bunnies and unicorns frolic.

Meanwhile, let’s agree that Roosevelt saved our nation.  Saved capitalism, made it work again. Kept enough factories going to enable us to switch to war-time production, made it possible to beat Hitler.

The New Deal worked.  Could it have worked better?  Sure, maybe.  But let’s not make the mistake of basing future policies on fantasies and pipe dreams and projections.  We don’t know what could have happened.  We know what did happen, and how much our country continues to owe Franklin Roosevelt.