Across The Board Spending Cuts Reduce Spending Across The Board, Even On Newsworthy Programs

This conservative wag has my number:

I really don’t understand how people can be so blinkered as to think that it’s somehow unfair to point out that a political movement that supports across the board cuts in federal spending does, in fact, want to cut spending on each and every program. That includes programs that are currently newsworthy. However, since it’s apparently unfair to accurately characterize the consequences of across-the-board cuts in federal spending as applied to newsworthy events, let’s just discuss other things.

— When you cut funding across the board, you cut funding for responding to forest fires.
— When you cut funding across the board, you cut funding for hungry children.
— When you cut funding across the board, you cut funding for medical research.
— When you cut funding across the board, you cut funding for infectious disease monitoring.

As it happens, neither homes burning down in wildfires nor malnourished children nor cancer deaths nor flu epidemics are in the news today. So the fact that congressional Republicans cut spending on preventing those things isn’t highly salient. But the good news is that pointing out that they cut funding on this stuff doesn’t constitute “politicizing” any ongoing natural disasters. Astute readers will note, however, that the meaning of across the board spending cuts is that you’re cutting spending on all programs.