Some indiscreet reality:
If [the sequester is] not reversed, federal spending at the discretion of Congress will eventually fall to a new five-decade low. Cuts of even larger size are scheduled to take effect every year over the next 10, signaling an era of government austerity ...
... in the midst of an unemployment depression.
This, eighty years after the ideation of countercyclical economics and less than two months after the International Monetary Fund's "mea culpa" that "it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth" in Europe.
Now no one is arguing that America's sequester will equal Europe's severity. But some do wonder why Republicans' ignorance of modern macroeconomics persists, to which I would counterargue that there is probably little such ignorance. Most GOPers--other, that is, than its incurably ignorant Louie Gohmerts and Rand Pauls--understand with lethal precision what misfortunes austerity will inflict. And nothing could make them happier.
Republicans adore deficits, the ratcheting up of which has been their political program for roughly an uninterrupted 30 years. The squeezing of private investment? Pshaw. Stratospheric deficits mean the squeezing of social safety nets; austerity means even higher deficits due to lower economic growth; thus what is popularly marketed as "conservative fiscal prudence" is in fact a latent pathogen--additional austerity now ensures an even tighter squeeze later.
But that, I imagine, tells us nothing the GOP doesn't already know--and love. It wins on both ends of the squeeze play.