Sequester who is responsible

They intend to cut essential services such as meat inspection and air traffic control under the sequester to maximize pressure on Congress to raise taxes. Federal spending has increased dramatically in the last several years; there is no reason a small percentage cut should cause the catastrophic problems the President has predicted.

To get our fiscal house in order, all agencies and programs should be expected to continue doing their jobs with fewer tax dollars. It is always difficult to reduce spending, but the longer we wait to address this problem, the less flexibility we will have in making the cuts and the more painful they will be.

We must start to make these decisions and I am optimistic Congress and the President will come to an agreement soon to replace the arbitrary cuts with more responsible and less disruptive reductions. And today, the White House released a fact sheet arguing that the president's call for a balanced package "cannot in even the slightest way be considered a change of policy, a change of expectations, or moving the goalposts.

Even Woodward's own book, the White House pointed out, included a passage documenting as much. And despite the crowing from Republicans about the White House's culpability in the mess that sequester has become, Woodward himself does not absolve the GOP of blame. The takeaway: Everybody's hands are dirty. But just days before a manufactured crisis sets fire to America's economic recovery, policymakers have fled the burning building, seemingly more inclined to point fingers than put out the blaze.

Please enter email address to continue. Sequestration -- automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending -- was to be the punishment if the supercommittee could not come up with a plan. The cuts were designed to be as clumsy and inflexible as possible, in order to motivate lawmakers to come up with a better approach. That's why agency heads have very little discretion on which programs are hit by the cuts: They were designed to inflict maximum suffering on both parties' priorities, with little wiggle room to mitigate the pain.

Republicans would be motivated to compromise to keep defense spending from being axed, while Democrats would come to the table to protect domestic programs. That was the stick, but there was also a carrot: The supercommittee had enormous power.

Whatever deal it produced would go directly to the floor of the House and Senate, ineligible for filibuster or amendment. And so, in September , the supercommittee held its first and only formal meeting.

It would also hold four public hearings, but most of its business was conducted behind the scenes. At first, there were glimmers of hope. As recounted in Politico 's excellent supercommittee postmortem , there were private, bipartisan meetings between Baucus and Camp, who chair the Senate and House tax committees, respectively; Kerry and Portman went on bike rides and tried till the bitter end to work out a compromise. But it didn't take long for the two sides to realize there was little middle ground between their irreconcilable positions.

Republicans wouldn't raise taxes, and Democrats wouldn't cut entitlements. Each side offered what it saw as concessions -- Republicans proposing modest revenue increases from tax reform, Democrats offering trims to Medicare and Medicaid.

But each side saw the other's idea of "compromise" as laughably insufficient. By about a week before the November 23 deadline, it was clear that there was no deal to be had.

Why did the supercommittee fail so miserably, and what lessons can we draw from it for the current stalemate, which is really the same stalemate 15 months later?