The Sequester That Wasn't

Matt Purple reports:

By now just reading the word “sequester” should render the average reader cowering under his desk while “Flight of the Valkyries” thunders in his mind. Sequestration, after all, was supposed to hack apart the social order as we knew it. Chris Matthews called it a “doomsday machine.” President Obama warned that “people are going to be hurt.” The Congressional Budget Office predicted 750,000 jobs could be lost. Sequestration, as the trendy metaphor went, was a meat cleaver when what we really needed was a scalpel.

It now seems the cleaver had a rather dull edge. A recent Government Accountability Office found that the sequester resulted in exactly one government layoff. One. That means sequestration has killed the same number of federal jobs as a Tweet praising the show “2 Broke Girls.”

The Feds need to be given something to really scream about. But given the IRS’s unlimited power to collect, Congress’s unlimited to power to spend, and the Fed’s unlimited power to debase the currency, how can they be made to?