Jack Lew's austerity bomb.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment

AS Jack Lew, President O bam as choice for Treasury Secretary, sailed through his confirmation hearings, Americans got ready to duck and cover for the blast from the austerity bomb that went off on March 1.

The Obama Administration was supposed to be on our side in holding off the massive, automatic, senseless "sequester" cuts that hit at the beginning of March.

Instead, a combination of lousy negotiating with Republicans in Congress and a pro-Wall Street bias that makes deficits an obsession even in this stagnant economy left ordinary citizens unprotected.

The Democrats, and the Obama Administration in particular, have simply not done enough to defend Americans from the pain of austerity and the unnecessary economic damage the sequester cuts are bound to do to our country.

Lew is a prime example.

The whole sequester idea was his brainchild, together with White House Congressional relations chief Rob Nabors, according to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.

In his latest book, Woodward describes then-White House budget director Lew presenting the plan for the automatic cuts to Harry Reid in 2011. Reid, according to the book, bent over and put his head between his knees like he was going to be sick.

The idea, Lew explained, was that Democrats would win the game of chicken. The $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts would be so unacceptable to Republicans and Democrats alike that it would never come to pass.

It didn't work out that way

While Obama seemed to win the first round of those negotiations when he got the Republicans to agree on tax hikes for the very rich, it was still a lopsided agreement that fundamentally favors Republican ideology, as Senator Tom Harkin pointed out.

For starters, the deal permanently codifies the Bush-era tax breaks for people who make up to $400,000, or $450,000 for couples. Those tax cuts had been temporary until now.

Relief for people of more modest means, on the other hand, is still tenuous, Harkin noted. "It should be the other way around."

Rhetorically, we have now moved the bar on the "middle class" from the top 2 percent who make $250,000 to the top 1 percent, who make $400,000.

More fundamentally, the very terms of the debate--which ignored the importance of getting people back to work, even as unemployment remains above 7 percent, and left aside the critical role of investment in infrastructure and education in getting the economy back on track--favored the Republicans' model of austerity for the...