Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.
This is a nice illustration of what is known as the Washington Monument Gambit. That is, when making decisions about budget cuts, do the most harm with the most painful cuts possible so that you can reinstate the spending that you want.
The Whitehouse is unleashing WMG on the populous for political gain. And if that wasn't enough, as Sowell continues,
President Obama has said that he would veto legislation to let him choose what to cut. That should tell us everything we need to know about the utter cynicism of this glib man.
He doesn't want to make his own plan (sequestration) work, but wants to inflict pain on the poor and vulnerable in order to get his way. Possibly because that plan was never intended to work budgetarily, but was a political maneuver to check mate the GOP.
Harming the most needy is usually the sort of thing rich Republicans are accused of – whether they have the power to do such things or not – and here the President is actually doing it right before our eyes precisely because he has the power to inflict pain on the electorate.
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