James A. McClure

Booo! Sequestration is coming! Our military will be hollowed out! Toddlers will be ejected from Head Start classrooms! Our food will immediately spoil in the absence of federal inspectors! All medical research will be scrapped!

That’s what politicians and the news media are saying. Do you believe them? I don’t.

How drastic are the cuts? We’re talking about a 7 percent cut to defense and a 5 percent cut to federal agencies — most of which received double-digit budget increases in the last few years.

In the private sector,  budget cuts of this magnitude are not a big deal. When I was a manager in a Bell Telephone company during the telecommunications reorganization of the 1970s and 80s, annual budget cuts were routine. My group was chronically understaffed and absorbed additional responsibilities as the company downsized. In one case the department where I worked was cut by half.

But here’s the difference: Private companies need to compete for business and cannot afford cuts to customer service. So the telephone company I worked for cut thousands of jobs while leaving its service centers and installation-repair force at full strength. We eliminated layers of management, contracted-out support services and slashed headquarters staffs. It was a big change for us but our customers never noticed the difference.

There are many ways to cut an organization’s budget and managers have choices. So it’s always puzzled me that government agencies are unable to make cuts that won’t inconvenience the public. Can government bureaucrats be that inept as managers? Or, do they deliberately choose cuts that will have the most impact so that taxpayers will pony up? That’s the impression I get when my local school district cuts teaching positions without reducing administration, or when the state government cuts funding for daycare centers while leaving bureaucrats’ jobs intact.

So the coming federal sequestration is no catastrophe. It will pinch the Department of Defense, which has already taken budget cuts and is constrained by long-term commitments. But I suspect the decision to cancel deployment of an aircraft carrier is more showmanship than austerity.

Some government employees will be furloughed temporarily but will still have jobs – unlike the millions of private sector workers who lost jobs while the federal government added 250,000 employees between 2007 and 2011.

But this modest dent in the massive federal budget will play out as high drama. National parks will close. Programs for disadvantaged children will be curtailed. TV reporters will have a field day covering a daily drumbeat of public pain. And President Obama will travel around the country, at $181,000 an hour on Air Force One, to make his pitch for higher taxes.

No one is forcing the government to inconvenience the public. There are many other ways to save money. The government could declare a moratorium on travel and conferences. (The President could set the example by staying in Washington for a while.) Federal agencies could furlough their headquarters staffs and postpone issuing new regulations. The State Department could delay aid payments to places like Egypt and Palestine. Entire agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, could shut down completely for a month or two. But that won’t happen because nobody would notice.

One of the more sensible ideas emerging from the political soap opera of gun control is requiring a background check for everyone who purchases a firearm. That’s a great idea, but can we trust the government to do this? Not because the feds might use the data for sinister purposes, as some gun owners fear, but because there’s a good chance the government will screw it up.

Some government information systems work pretty well, of course: My Social Security checks are deposited on time and I’m certain the IRS will catch me if fail to file a tax return. But there also are spectacular failures such as widespread fraud in welfare payments and millions in erroneous tax refunds to incarcerated felons.

The Navy’s computers can guide a cruise missile to demolish a bunker hundreds of miles away. Yet when I was in the Naval Reserve my unit’s paychecks were regularly delayed or scrambled by the Navy’s computerized pay system. Different computer, I hope.

My home state of New Mexico has chronic problems managing information. Every year or so some sort of computer glitch causes massive inconvenience to citizens or employees. Most recently a bungled transition to a new computer system delayed unemployment benefit payments for thousands of people. The state’s paper-based prison records have resulted in the early release of dangerous felons.

The private sector seems to do a better job of housebreaking its databases. Banks, utilities and retailers routinely handle millions of transactions and errors are relatively rare. When someone tried to use my credit card number to book a flight in London last year, the airline caught it and the credit card company took immediate action.

Private companies also are better than government agencies at sharing information. If I apply for a Discover card, the folks there will know whether I’ve missed any payments on my Visa card. Yet judges in New Mexico often are unaware that a defendant has prior convictions in the next county or is registered as a sex offender in another state. The State of New Mexico is having difficulty verifying the citizenship status of registered voters because of delays in getting information from the federal Department of Homeland Security.

People laughed when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich suggested outsourcing the immigration database to American Express to reduce errors and fraud. But if the feds are serious about keeping criminals from buying firearms, this may be the best solution for universal background checks for gun purchases.

I can’t help getting cynical about the current political spasm of gun control. The horrific massacre of schoolchildren by a mentally unbalanced shooter unquestionably was a tragedy and demands action. So what’s the instinctive response? Make it harder for sane, law-abiding people to own guns.

President Obama’s anti-gun rhetoric is a bonanza for the firearms business and has significantly increased the number of weapons in circulation. The dramatic increase in gun sales may be his most successful economic stimulus to date. (What is it about the guy that makes people want to run out and buy a gun whenever he opens his mouth?)

Banning assault weapons sounds reasonable and I’m all for improving background checks. The problem is that restricting gun ownership has never deterred mass shootings, even in tightly regulated places like Norway. We’re kidding ourselves if we think this will prevent the next bloodbath. No gun control law will keep the homicidally deranged (or your average gangbanger) from getting firearms.

If we’re serious about preventing tragedy, it’s more productive to identify and treat a relatively small number of sick puppies than to limit the rights of millions of law-abiding gun owners. Mental health treatment was an afterthought in the President’s proposal. The state of Colorado is taking more substantive action with a proposal to expand mental health treatment and include commitment records in firearms background checks.

Treating the mentally ill saves their lives, too. Here in Albuquerque, we’ve seen a surge in shootings by police officers. Most of the victims had mental health problems and were shot when they displayed weapons and posed an apparent threat to the cops.

Unfortunately, overhauling mental health treatment is a complicated issue. It’s easier for politicians to demonize the National Rifle Association than pick a fight with the American Civil Liberties Union over the rights of the mentally ill.

The gun control argument also highlights our country’s cultural divide (and widens it, thanks to President Obama’s unerring instinct for wedge issues).

I grew up in gun control country: I knew very few gun owners, and support for gun control was the default position of most people I encountered. My hometown of Oak Park, Ill., was one of the first communities to enact a handgun ban in 1984 and even gratuitously declared itself a nuclear-weapon-free zone. I wrote a letter to the local paper: I’m okay with the handgun ban, but if we can’t have nuclear weapons how can we protect our families?

Now I live in gun country. New Mexico has no gun registration except for concealed-carry permits. Hunting is popular here, and it’s not unusual to hear about a homeowner or shopkeeper shooting a would-be robber. The state votes Democratic but its Congressional delegation gets favorable ratings from the NRA. Recently 30 of the state’s 33 county sheriffs held a news conference in Santa Fe to declare their opposition to the President’s assault weapons ban.

I suspect that New Mexico, and a lot of other states, are foreign to some of the media folks and academics who believe we should act more like Europeans and dismiss those who “cling to guns or religion.”

Personally, I am agnostic on guns. I’m grateful I never had to use the pistol I carried in Vietnam. I had lots of fun practice-shooting a Thompson submachine gun but have no desire to own one. Eventually I may get a handgun at home – my neighborhood has occasional burglaries – but am in no hurry. Most of my neighbors are armed and that makes me feel safer.

The new right-to-work law in Michigan has been great political theater and may signal an interesting trend for government, politics and the American labor movement.

President Obama’s election in 2008 was hailed as a victory for organized labor. His administration is the most blatantly pro-union in recent history. Yet unions have been decisively defeated in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan. More setbacks for unions appear likely as the economic gap widens between right-to-work and compulsory-union states, and as local taxpayers confront the unsustainable costs of public employee unions.

The union response has been traditional picket-line theater with chanting mobs and thuggish threats of blood and civil war: predictable and so 20^th-century. The argument that workers will not join unions unless required by law is an admission of weakness. The invocation of union history and the 40-hour week, etc., makes me wonder whether unions have worked themselves out of a job and what they’ve done for their members lately.

State right-to-work laws are significant because our federal system often makes states the bellwether of change. States are leading on issues such as gay marriage and legalized marijuana, and if this trend continues our dysfunctional national government will eventually follow. Limitations on union power may be on the same trajectory.

I’m no fan of unions, but I’d hate to see them disappear because they play a useful role in the private economy as a check on management stupidity. Unions win about half of certification elections, and the threat of unionization is a potent force in keeping employers honest. But they’re a drag on the economy when they kill jobs, block free-trade agreements and bankrupt cities.

Unions are overdue for reform and have an opportunity to re-invent themselves if they choose. There is no reason why unions cannot thrive in a right-to-work environment if they are accountable to their members and make a persuasive case for voluntary payment of union dues. That would be a big change, however: Unions operate like Third-World governments with far less transparency and accountability than corporations, and their leaders are more accustomed to coercion than persuasion.

Unions won’t reform on their own, of course. Union monopolies finance the Democratic Party, and elected officials will use their considerable power to maintain the status quo. One of the ironies of progressive politics is that folks who are pro-choice on abortion are required to be anti-choice when it comes to joining a union or selecting a public school. That makes no more sense than the conservative coupling of economic freedom with Christian Sharia law.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

If a tree falls in the forest and the news media ignore it, does it make a sound?

What constitutes news, and how that drives daily editorial decisions, is the subject of philosophic rumination in schools of journalism and daily argument in newsrooms. The foundation of news coverage is the public interest and the right of citizens to know what affects them. This principle is enshrined in countless newspaper mission statements, and even in the code of ethics of the Public Relations Society of America.

Freedom of information is fragile. Repressive governments routinely shut down independent news outlets, reporters are an endangered species in a growing number of countries and some governments are seeking to censor the Internet. One of the pillars of American democracy is the skeptical zeal of journalists and their traditional adversarial relationship with government.

That’s why it’s distressing to see news media in the U.S. squandering their freedom through politically motivated self-censorship. The most flagrant example is the lack of coverage of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador and several others. I’ve come to accept biased and slanted news coverage, but this is more serious: a conscious decision to ignore the questions surrounding a significant incident and effectively suppress the story.

Even if you ignore the political overtones, there is much to question. Instead of issuing the customary noncommittal statement while the facts were being sorted out, the Obama administration immediately blamed the embassy attack on an obscure Internet video. Even though the remarks of the President and other officials were carefully worded enough to avoid outright lies, it appears that their objective was to advance a narrative that is proving to be false.

The major news media accepted that explanation, and the story would have disappeared had it not been for the persistence of Fox News and Republican members of Congress. It’s now apparent that the Libya attack was premeditated, that the U.S. was aware of the danger, and that security and rescue efforts were bungled.

As the facts emerge, the major national media are beginning to give the story minimal, reluctant coverage, perhaps shamed by competition from Fox News. Contrast this with the intense media coverage of the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal in 2003, when TV crews camped on the front lawns of Bush administration officials. The only explanation for this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity is that the news media are declining to cover the story because it might jeopardize President Obama’s re-election campaign.

One result of the unprecedented romance between this president and most of the news media is the Pravda-like docility of the White House press corps. President Obama has held fewer news conferences than his predecessors, and it has become customary for the Prez to bypass Washington reporters in favor of journalism-free entertainment programs. If Presidents Clinton or Bush had tried this, the press corps would be out for blood.

Even in this environment, the lack of media interest in the Benghazi incident crosses a new line: subordination of the public interest to political advocacy.

The good news is that freedom of information in the United States is self-correcting. If President Obama is re-elected the ideological corruption of the news media will continue, but not for long. Sixty percent of the respondents in a recent Gallup poll now distrust the “mainstream” news media, and the three major networks are losing their audience to Fox News and an army of bloggers. Sooner or later, economics will force the media to return to honest journalism or go out of business.

If Governor Romney is elected, the White House press corps will awake from their slumber and the news media will immediately revert to their traditional adversarial role… just as the Founding Fathers envisioned.