(When published in 1775, this little pamphlet was the biggest best seller of the day. Photo Wikipedia).

Well, the holidays are thankfully in the wake behind us. I may still have the Christmas lights up, but I will turn them off one of these days soon. It is only common sense to save the electricity. The days are getting longer, one by one, and I will be looking for the earth to begin once more to flourish with green. Maybe even this weekend.

The weather-guessers are saying that we may be scraping 70 degrees by Sunday.

It is the anniversary of the publication of a pamphlet written by a fellow named Thomas Paine. It was called “Common Sense,” and explored in plain English the case for putting the King of England (and America, among other realms) on furlough.  It was, as a proportion of copies printed to the total population of 1775, the most widely circulated document in American history.

The next year, he contributed his greatest line to literature in his tract “The American Crisis:”

“These are the times that try (people’s) souls.”

I don’t know if that quote is directly applicable to the present, since there is no King breathing down our necks, but it certainly does feel like it. I wish this morning’s outing was going to feature a cool recipe, or humorous anecdotes about the Regulars at the Amen Corner at Willow, but it doesn’t.

We are back to work, and the peevishness that went along with it has dissipated a bit. There is a new Congress, and the Budget Cliff has been avoided. Unfortunately, nothing in particular was solved, except to provide more tax breaks to Hollywood and the NASCAR owners, for reasons best known to the United States Senate.

Left on the table was the unthinkable, which is to say the Sequestration package of automatic cuts to the discretionary budget in Defense and Civil programs. And that pesky debt-ceiling thing.

A mark of how insane this has become is the notion that the Treasury could mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin, deposit it in the Treasury (presumably on an annual basis) and make the problem go away.

I won’t presume to say whether any of this is “good” or “bad.” That would descend into some arcane discussion of right and left and how long Keynesian economics is supposed to support trillion dollar deficits or whether the Austrian School has got anything right at all.

The macro picture is important, I suppose, but we have to live where we are, and on this, I live in Washington and work in a business that depends on the government. So I will let the alleged grown-ups address the structural problems and continue to plan on how to keep living.

As you recall, Secretary of Defense Panetta wrote a letter to us all in December, advising us to stay cool and not panic. “Sequestration,” he said, “will be something we can deal with later in the New Year.”

You do not have to be a rocket scientist (Sorry in advance to my pal Natasha, since she actually is one) to recall that the Federal Government is already well into the Second Quarter of it’s fiscal year, and hence the time for adjustment is much closer than we normally think, as we are just getting used to calendar 2013.

According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, unless the Congress manages to cooperate enough to make a deal on the spending cuts apportioned in the Sequestration legislation, DoD will be forced to begin monthly furloughs of the nearly 800,000 civilians who work for the Department.

That could happen as soon as March.

We were in a meeting with a partner yesterday, in one of those towers out in Tysons. The gray sky was spitting chill rain. Three of us sat on one side of a long conference table and we hammered out a deal about some prospective work. It went well, with the exception of the nagging little problem that we would have to get past whatever it is that is either going to happen, or not happen.

It makes assumptions necessary. It hard to plan, where there is no apparent plan, nor anything like a bipartisan effort to come up with one.

The Budget Cliff legislation- or as it is also known, the “American Taxpayer Relief Act” (an oxymoron, since everyone’s tax bite went up)- contains about 9% in cuts to DoD, and applied this far into the year, actually is the equivalent of a15% percent cut over the remaining seven months of the fiscal year.

Unless something changes, this happens automatically on March 1.
In like a lion, out like a lamb, I guess.

The people around the conference table did not have any good ideas about how to deal with something like that, or who to talk to if our customers are on unpaid leave.

It is weird. I guess they will figure something out. I mean, they have to, right? It is only common sense.

(Thomas Paine, with signature. He was a prescient guy: fiercely anti-slavery, he was in favor of a bunch of progressive ideas. He had a grand vision for society: he was one of the first to advocate a world peace organization and social security for the poor and elderly. His radical views on religion would undermine his influence, and when he died in New York in 1809, only a handful of people attended his funeral).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com