Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The US sequester cuts, Austerity and Europe

There is a huge outrage (especially in the media) about the sequester and the thus proposed cuts. Of course, clueless journalists that can't even read a spreadsheet chime in and sprout 'doom-n-gloom' rhetoric. Services on all levels would fail for rudimentary things like Firemen, Police etc. (you name it).
This might be marginally plausible, IF the sequester would cut actual spending!

However, it cuts only proposed future spending, as you can see here in this outake from the CBO-report:



You can see that the 2012 and 2013 budget is flat and after that outlays (spending) goes up again. This INCLUDES the proposed "cuts". To even call them cuts instead of costs stagnation is a lie and very unscientific.

This is the austerity we also see in Europe, which supposedly is killing countries:


No country actually did much in the way of austerity, they all only reigned in "future negative cashflow"!
It only shows that the sequester will change nothing, it doesn't CUT services. It only freezes the current (certainly not ABYSIMAL) state. It doesn't bode well for the world and for the US in particular, that even small non-cuts like this are derided by the communitarian public.
It seems that not even crisis do get people to realize that they are in a mess...

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