If not 'sequester,' then what? Five ideas from left and right.

Few in Washington believe that "the sequester,” $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to hit the federal budget as of March 1, is a good idea. But what's the alternative? Here are five proposals, from the right, the center, and the left, to replace the sequester. Which do you like?

5. President Obama: ‘Think less big than Simpson-Bowles’

Charles Dharapak/AP
President Barack Obama waves after speaking about the sequester at the White House complex in Washington Tuesday.

Obama has made two promises pertaining to the sequester. First, he vowed to veto any offset to the sequester that doesn’t have the same level of deficit reduction. Later, he promised that the sequester would not come into effect.

The president has not put forward a formal bill to replace sequestration, but the White House has argued that his proposal to Speaker Boehner during the “fiscal cliff” talks at the end of 2012 is his blueprint for doing so.

Specifically, Obama would cut spending $200 billion over the next decade, split between the Defense Department and all other functions of government. To that, he would add, over 10 years, $200 billion in targeted cuts, including asking federal employees to contribute more toward their pensions and slicing agricultural subsidies, and another $400 billion in health savings by cutting payments to drug companies and hospitals, for example.

Obama then asks for $580 billion in new tax revenue over the next decade through capping income-tax deductions at 28 percent for the wealthiest Americans and ending other tax preferences. Add in switching to the chained CPI measure favored by Simpson-Bowles (more than $200 billion, split between spending and revenues), and he offers up a total package of $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

5 of 5

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.