Big Government Sequester Armageddon Wrong Again

Who is the real extremist?

So recall that Obama got into his Chicken Little routine on February 10 backed up by firefighters who would no longer be able to douse blazes, police who would no longer be patrolling the streets and EMT's who would abandon dying accident victims along the side of the roads  Obama told us the sequester will cost the economy "hundreds of thousands of jobs." Pure silliness and fabrication spewed forth. It turns out the sequester has barely impacted its ground zero economy, Washington, DC.

“The surprise is that the [DC region] economy is as good as it is,” said Stephen S. Fuller, the economist who directs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. “We’ve done better than I expected.”

In January, Fuller predicted that the sequester, if enacted, would be an “end-of-the-world kind of hit” to the regional economy. He wrote an analysis of the cuts in March concluding they would kill more than 325,000 jobs in Virginia, the District and Maryland combined.
That estimate included both direct and indirect effects — that is, layoffs not just among federal workers and contractors, but also the workers, such as waiters or car salespeople, whose jobs depend on spending from federal paychecks.

So far, the direct job effects have been relatively small. The metro area shed 1,000 federal jobs in April, accelerating a belt-tightening trend; in the 11 months before that, the area lost nearly 4,000 federal jobs. Meanwhile, professional business services — the job category that includes government contracting — has grown at roughly the same rate this year as in 2012 and 2011. No major contractor has issued a government-required notification that it is planning a mass layoff.

The sequester is a no-quester in terms of its economic impact. It always was. You can't trust this president or his lapdog experts, not at all.