Sequester Scare Tactics: The New Yorker Last November, shortly after the election, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sent a letter to the hawkish Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, in which he outlined the impact that the sequester could have on the U.S. military. In that letter, he wrote: It was a funny thing for Panetta to say. Self-consciously or not, he was making an argument almost identical to one that had been used against his boss less than a year before. "Our Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917," Mitt Romney said during a January, 2012, debate between the Republican Presidential candidates - describing not the potential state of the military post-sequester but the military as it stood at the time. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947. We are cutting our number of troops. We are not giving the veterans the care they deserve. We simply cannot continue to cut our Department of Defense budget if we are going to remain the hope of the Earth. And I will fight to make sure America retains military superiority. What Romney said was technically accurate. Politifact rated it "pants on fire" anyway - and rightfully so. Romney's numbers were correct, and so are Panetta's; it's the way they're using them that's incredibly misleading. Obama hasn't cut the military to the bone, as Romney would have had you believe, and the sequester won't leave the Navy in a position to be routed by a pre-First World War version of itself. Raw numbers of ships and planes are all but meaningless: imagine, for instance, what just one of the ships the Navy has today could do to ten or twenty of the models it had in service in World War I, or how many planes and pilots from 1947 might fall to a single member of today's Air Force in an F-22 Raptor. As Obama himself said when Romney hit him on the size of the Navy in their October 2012 debate, "Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed." There is no really serious argument to be made that the sequester will be good for the short-term financial health of the country. Abruptly pulling as much as eighty-five billion dollars out of a still-fragile economy in the course of a single fiscal year isn't a recipe for libertarian utopia; it's a way to all but guarantee sluggish growth, if not an actual recession. John Cassidy has more on what the sequester might do to the economy as a whole in the near future, and on the way cuts in defense spending might have already started dragging G.D.P. down. And over the full ten-year period affected by the sequester, there will be real pain: jobs lost; people going hungry or uninsured, or both; bigger class sizes in schools; and much more. These are the consequences of cuts made with a chainsaw and designed to be so odious that Congress couldn't help but come together to design a better plan. The Obama Administration has gone beyond all this, however, and started to describe the immediate, direct impact of the sequester in Y2K-like terms: long delays at airports; the country left open to terrorists; tens of thousands of children kicked out of preschool, with tens of thousands more unvaccinated; contaminated meat left uninspected. But as reporters drill down into these claims, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that - with a few important exceptions, like sharp cuts to unemployment benefits - the Administration is seriously overstating its case regarding the short-term effects of the cuts in a last-ditch effort to force Republicans in Congress to the negotiating table, or at least saddle them with the political consequences if they hold out. Some amount of this kind of scaremongering is forgivable - as forgivable as political misinformation gets, at least, which is not very - in part because nobody is entirely sure how this will play out, or how all of the cuts will be distributed. But the Administration is playing with fire here, as it has been ever since it brought up the idea of implementing a sequester in order to produce a deficit deal and debt-limit hike in the first place. Obama made much of his reëlection campaign about the necessity of government and the good it does, and his second term will clearly be built on those themes. Important as it is to avoid the sequester going into effect, if he begins his final four years in office by painting doomsday scenarios that don't actually come true, he may end up undermining everything he has to say about government before he even has time to really get started.