Yes, but.....

Predictably, everyone is up in arms at the possibility of some cuts in the federal budget. President Obama is asking Congress not to allow the sequester cuts (already delayed a couple of months) to occur, but has thus far proposed no alternative plan to deal with the ballooning debt.

Of course the cuts will be painful. People will lose their jobs or take significant pay cuts (including perhaps even members of my own family). Companies will lose federal business, especially the defense industries. Painful? Yes. But what is the alternative? Borrow and borrow and borrow until finally the whole system crashes? That would/will be far more painful.

Any rational system would have seen this coming years ago when there was still time to cut back slowly, allow normal attrition to reduce the workforce, and mitigate the inevitable pain in all sorts of ways. The longer we go without addressing the problem, the more intractable and painful the inevitable adjustment will be. This isn't rocket science!

Unfortunately, there seems little hope that either the administration or Congress will be at all rational about this. No doubt we will see a cliff-hanger last-minute resolution which once again doesn't address the real problem. Perhaps there will be a few cosmetic cuts (probably mostly accounting tricks, just like all the other cuts recently). Perhaps there will be a few token revenue increases. But I see little hope that this administration, this Congress, or either of the two parties we currently have in this country will make any of the hard choices that rationally need to be made.

Well, in the end they are there because we voted them in, so the probably very painful consequences will be on the heads of ourselves, the American voters. We get the government we deserve!