On Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn reacted to the sequestration deadline.
He explained to fill-in host Guy Benson that this shows the elected officials think every bit of government is essential. But he also said some of the fiscal mismanagement could stem from a lack of literacy in economics and numbers.
“You know, what’s crazy about this is that let’s pretend that the officials who are speaking on this, the cabinet secretaries who are coming out and telling us that the world will come to an end tomorrow, that the planes are going to be dropping from the skies, that our infants and seniors are going to be dying untended in hospitals, that your shower head is going to be blasting out fecal coliform on you in the morning — that all of this is going to be happening just for his hypothetical $40 billion of so-called entirely phony sequestration cuts, now assuming they’re not just lying to us,” Steyn said. “They’re basically telling us that nothing can ever be done about Washington spending ever. If $40 billion of hypothetical cuts means that the planes are dropping from the skies, and Obama is even canceled the deployment of a carrier to the Gulf, you know, in other words, when the Iranians go nuclear, he’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, I would have stopped that, but we were all tied up with the sequestration. Sequestration is what allowed the mullahs to go nuclear.’ If that’s true, nothing can ever be done about anything ever, and Washington might as well just close up and go home.”
Benson asked for Steyn to react to California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters statement on Thursday that “over 170 million jobs that could be lost.” And despite a spokesman for the congresswoman saying that she misspoke, Steyn said he wasn’t so sure that was accurate, noting that many of these members of Congress are “economically illiterate.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, by the way. I mean, one of the things I find, and you will not be unfamiliar with this, Guy, is that these heavily staffed congressmen, congresswomen, senators are often entirely economically illiterate,” Steyn said. “It may well be that Maxine Waters has absolutely no idea, could not reliably name the population of this country, or the number of people in employment at any one time.”
Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” recalled that Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had made a similar erroneous statement suggesting 500 million jobs could be lost without passage of Obama’s 2009 stimulus.
“I didn’t really — 500 million jobs a month would be lost,” he said. “That’s the entire population of the United States, plus Canada, plus the United Kingdom, plus Germany, plus Australia losing their jobs every month. I mean, that’s the thing. These guys can’t stand up in public and demonstrate any reliable. … Why is it any surprise that they accidentally spent $16 trillion dollars they don’t have? They’ve got no grasp of numbers, these guys.”
