By the end of the week, everything changes. Severe spending cuts will unleash waves of devastation across the U.S. Picture air travel snarled. Meat inspections curtailed. National security imperiled. Seventy thousand children booted from Head Start programs, 10,000 teaching jobs jeopardized, disability payments delayed, aid withheld from needy Americans and foreign governments perched on the brink of chaos. Hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost, and the fragile economy knocked into a tailspin. This is the nightmare that would unfold, according to Barack Obama and the heads of federal agencies, if Congress can’t forge a deal to evade sequestration, the $1.2 trillion package of spending cuts over the next decade that is set to kick in March 1. The sequester was designed to be so disastrous that would it would force Washington’s warring factions to the bargaining table. But what was once an unthinkable result has come to seem inevitable. This time there is little hope that dealmakers will swoop in with an 11th-hour reprieve. With the deadline looming four days away, the question enveloping the capital is not whether the sequester will happen, but rather how bad it will be. (VIDEO: The Sequester Fight: TIME Explains) As usual, the two parties have crunched the data and come up with wildly divergent conclusions. If the White House envisions economic calamity, many Republicans are treating the sequester more like the Mayan apocalypse. They consider the prospect of lopping $85 billion off the $3.6 trillion federal budget — about a 2.4% cut — to be a good start. A “pittance,” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said. If you ask the GOP, the White House’s dire predictions are designed to scare the public and pressure the GOP to acquiesce. And so, when they aren’t trying to pin the policy on Obama, Republicans are working to cast the cuts as modest reductions to a bloated budget. “No one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play video games, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines,” wrote House … Continue reading A Sequester No One Wants