I'd love to be able to say that the sequester debate has hit peak stupid with John Boehner's latest pronouncement, but if I did, I'd surely be swiftly proven wrong. Here's what he said at a press conference on Monday afternoon:
REPORTER QUESTION: Do you have a sense of how many jobs will be lost as a result of the sequester?
HOUSE SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Uh, I do not. But I can tell you this: If we don't solve the spending problem here in Washington, there'll be tens of millions of jobs in the future that won't happen because of the debt load that's being laid on the backs of our kids and our grandkids.
Okay, so the guy who's supposedly running the U.S. House of Representatives—and the guy who as of today is insisting that we endure sequestration, no matter whose idea it was in the first place—doesn't have the foggiest clue how many jobs will be lost as a result of his harebrained insistence on the sequester (hint: in Boehner's home state, there
will be nearly 30,000 furloughs), but he does know that tens of millions of imaginary jobs that have yet to be created are on the line if we don't cut spending starting right now this instant.
I guess this means that when Boehner talks with a furloughed defense worker, or to a elementary school kid whose teacher just got laid off, or to the young mother whose children just got kicked off Head Start, he's got a sequester defense prepared and ready to go. "I didn't do this to hurt you," he'll say. "I did this to save your future granddaughter's second son's third job, and the jobs of tens of millions of other people's future unnamed great grandkids. And no, I don't need your thanks now. They can thank me then, in 2075, or whenever the big sequester payoff happens."