Imagine you’re sitting in your boss’s office for your annual performance review. Your boss says you’re doing well, you’ve improved in several key areas, you’ve contributed to the bottom line of the company, but you need to work on keeping your voice down in your cubicle and try to fart less. (Oh, wait, that was my last performance review, not yours. Sorry.) He tells you that he’d been planning on giving you a 6% raise, but because of budget issues he can only give you a 5% raise. 

Would you freak out? Would you bitch and moan about how many things your family was going to have to cut back on?

This is exactly what’s happening with the sequester “cuts”. (Well, not exactly. Government hasn’t improved, not even a little.) We’re told that horrible horrible things are going to happen because there was a small decrease of the increase in the budget.

The administration is doing everything they can to make the cuts painful. When Charles Brown, a director at the Department of Agriculture ‘s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS] was asked about about managing the cuts to minimize the impact, he replied, ““However you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.” In other words, make it hurt.

Meanwhile, the same agency is planning a conference described as “a “mouthwatering event” featuring “fine wines and exceptional micro-brews paired with seasonally driven culinary delicacies.” Good thing they’re not cutting back on anything important.

Whenever my local school district wants more money, which they can only get by convincing us to vote for even higher property taxes, they always threaten to cut sports and music programs. Always. They never try to cut the six-figure salaries of administrators – they don’t even like to admit those exist. Instead they try to trigger an emotional response to con us into forking over even more.

The Obama administration is pulling the same kind of stunt, shutting down White House tours and threatening other programs that people respond to emotionally. The fact that this is a decrease of an increase is largely ignored by Obamafans, but even some Democrats are cringing at the stupidly being spewed. My favorite, so far, is Maxine Waters’ claim that the cuts will cost 170 million American jobs. Cool trick, considering that there are about 155 million jobs in the country. We’ll have 110% unemployment!

Smaller government is generally better government, but this doesn’t cut things nearly enough to make any real difference. When I become president the first thing I’ll do is a 25% across the board cut for nearly every federal agency, and the wholesale elimination of at least 10% of them. I can’t wait to hear Maxine’s response to that.