After the 'sequester,' now what?

It happened: $85 billion in across-the-board cuts to defense (8 percent cut) and social programs (5 to 6 percent) took effect March 1. Officials from President Obama on down spent weeks warning about the dire effects of these reductions. The cuts must occur this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Here's how things look.

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File
In this file photo, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is seen at a news conference earlier this month at the Pentagon.

1. Q: Remind me – why the "sequester" in the first place?

The Budget Control Act of 2011, signed by President Obama on Aug. 2, 2011, ended the federal debt-ceiling fight that had threatened to force the US government to default by Aug. 3. The bill also contained a mechanism to ensure future budget negotiations: the sequester, as it came to be called. The sequester was designed to be so unpalatable in the eyes of both Republicans and Democrats that they'd work hard to strike a deal. Needless to say, the sequester was not dire enough to avoid what both political parties should agree is a self-inflicted wound.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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