Josh Barro, Columnist

No Cheers for Sequestration

February 28, 2013 at 7:01 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Over at Slate (naturally), Matt Yglesias writes that, as ways of cutting the deficit go, the sequester actually isn't so bad. He says: "if you're a 'defense' dove like me and have a non-utopian view of the domestic discretionary budget then this looks like we're mostly talking about harmless spending cuts." Therefore, he says, it's better to let it hit than to repeal it.

This is wrongheaded for three reasons.