The Real Tragedy Of The Sequester Is Wasted Time

MATTHEW YGLESIAS has a counterintuitive take that the sequester is good policy for liberals, because most of the cuts are to defence spending, which is so grossly overdeveloped at this point that its top layer is, to a first approximation, completely useless.

Long story short, if you're a defense dove like me and have a nonutopian view of the domestic discretionary budget, then this looks like we're mostly talking about harmless spending cuts. It is very true that the current moment is not an optimal time to cut wasteful government spending. Given the high unemployment rate, the low and stable inflation rate, the low cost of federal borrowing, and the weird dynamics of "Evans Rule" monetary policy, I would say that 2013 is an excellent time for the federal government to waste some money on make-work military contracting gigs. But in the grand scheme of things, wasting resources on low-value programs is not a great idea, and there's more to life than timing.

A counter-counterintuitive take on this would start from that last interesting sentence. Is there actually more to life than timing? What if there isn't?

Put it this way: what's uniquely bad about the cuts in the sequester? What's bad about them, as Josh Barro writes, is that, because they fall abruptly and without logic, they destroy people's plans for the future.

Scientists who've just completed PhDs in research-oriented disciplines on the basis of expectations about reasonably predictable levels of funding for those fields discover there'll be nothing for them to do with their degrees.

People who've moved back to their homes after hurricanes, thinking they can restart their businesses, find they can't because there's no money to repair the bridges since FEMA funding was cut.

The Pentagon suddenly has to figure out how to cut a fixed percentage out of every individual procurement contract, which is going to mean a lot of bizarre, fundamentally senseless last-minute craziness.

And so forth. Most economic disappointments can be coped with, given time and a reasonable degree of predictability. But arbitrary cuts that fall suddenly give people no chance to adjust.

To stretch the point, there's a reason why hipster local labour exchanges use the unit of "hours" as currency, a move that actually goes back to Robert Owen's National Equitable Labour Exchange in the 1830s, and why sci-fi plots like that of "Time Out" envisage the possibility of substituting time for money entirely. Or why Taylorism was seen as the apotheosis of the industrial revolution, and why "just-in-time" delivery is such a big deal in modern manufacturing.

At some level raising productivity is nothing more or less than improved timing. Time is the one resource of which we have an absolutely finite amount, and people who suddenly and unpredictably break promises, undo plans, and scramble schedules are screwing up our lives in the most fundamental way possible: they are wasting our time.

This doesn't entirely bear on what Mr Yglesias was saying; he was just saying that if you want big defence cuts, the sequester delivers that, even though this may not be the best time for those cuts to happen in view of the weak economy. But I think it's useful to be reminded of why cutting in an abrupt, arbitrary fashion is so much worse than cutting in a planned fashion. Life is about using your time well. Chaos is the enemy.

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