The Opposite of Leadership

A willingness to sacrifice jobs for political gains is the opposite of leadership:

Obama said that just as people and companies have had to be cautious about spending, “government should have to tighten its belt as well. ... Obama has asked agencies to develop plans for cutting budgets 5 percent.

A leader would explain why the government -private sector equivalence is false in this instance, fight to keep people working instead of caving to the Austerians, and do everything possible to provide more jobs for people, not less (even if, in the end, the fight is lost the political gains from trying to push a jobs program through would, in my opinion, be far greater than the gains from issuing pink slips -- the administration needs to show it cares as much about saving jobs as it does about saving big banks). The jobs that are sacrificed will do almost nothing to help with the long-run budget problem, cutting the budget makes things worse in the short-run, and even if there was an argument for this, the political gains are unlikely to materialize. This is very disappointing.