By Alan Bean

Sequestration means the federal government will have to make $85 billion in across the board budget cuts.  While Americans like the idea of low taxes in the abstract, they won’t like the concrete consequences of this process.  On the other hand, if the government is spending obscene amounts of money to make America less safe and more unequal, a few cuts might encourage some long-overdue rethinking.

Sequestration will mean a 5% cut to the Department of Justice.  That’s 1.6 billion dollars, y’all.  Since the federal prison system has exploded by 800% since 1980 during a period of falling crime it might be time to close some prisons and find less expensive ways of promoting public safety.

This post on The Hill’s Congress blog makes precisely this argument. (more…)