I’m really down in the dumps. I’m ready to cash it all in. Doomsday is just around the corner. President Obama tells me my world will never be the same if we go into sequestration.  I’m beginning to sweat, although I had never heard of “sequestration” before this crisis.

So I did some checking and discovered that our nation’s yearly budget is about $3.55 trillion. The amount we are planning to cut, already approved by the president, is about $85 billion a year. That amounts to about 2.4 percent of the annual budget. To ordinary folks, $85 billion looks huge. Most people have never seen a billion-dollar bill. To top it all off, Obama has declared a near-national emergency as a result of the projected reduction in spending.

My grandmother used to warn me, when I was sitting in her kitchen drinking tea, that if I didn’t walk the straight and narrow, the sky would fall and God would punish me. Let me borrow from her script and add a bit of my own sarcastic projections to President Obama’s sequester fairy tales. To hear him talk, you’d almost believe seniors and the disabled will fall down in the streets because their portable oxygen tanks won’t be refilled. Tens of thousands of workers will lose their jobs, and the greatest economic recovery in our nation’s history will stop its gigantic growth and grind to a halt. Teachers will be pink–slipped, and high school seniors will have to learn their times tables without professional help. Meat and poultry inspectors will be furloughed, leading to a tsunami-like wave of salmonella poisonings throughout the country. Airports will be closed by the layoffs of already overweight and overworked TSA agents. Planes will fall out of the sky because flight controllers will be told to take their nap time at home. And all of this devastation because of a reduction of about 2 percent of our budget. Amazing!

How would that work for an average Joe bringing home $800 per week? With a reduction of 2.4 percent, he’d take home about $780. How would his family react to a weekly reduction of $20 out of an income of $800? First off, he’d sit down with the wife and budget. They’d cut back on all non-essential spending, like going to the movies only once a week, eating out only two meals a week, and perhaps the wife would trade Obama’s favorite Kobe steaks for cheaper cuts. Add up all of these changes in living, and you come up with — nothing. Except our leaders learn that cutting spending is much better than living on the Obama wild side and accumulating an impossible debt bill to China. I hope!

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Alan Bergstein

Alan Bergstein comes to our pages as a Brooklyn native. Father of four, retired NYC Principal, Korean War Veteran, patriot and Jewish and Israel activist.

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