The OP’s argument suffers from the fallacy of the excluded middle here. Being in favor of a balance budget doesn’t mean that the best answer is to just slash all spending across the board to meet the income. Hell, it doesn’t necessarily mean that government spending has to drop at all, though I think most people who support it think it should to some degree. Personally, I think we need to balance the budget, but we need to do it intelligently taking into account what is necessary and what isn’t and human cost and what it means in terms of taxation. It’s not a simple problem to solve.
But here’s the thing, as long as we’re deficit spending, we’re going to have to pay a cost at some time. We can’t spend in the deficit forever, eventually we have to start repaying. As with any debt, the longer we hold it, the greater the penalty will be. If I spend $1000 on my credit card and pay it off right away, I suffer no penalty. If I pay it off next month, I pay a little bit of interest. Or I can pay the minimum payment and pay a lot of interest. If I keep charging that kind of money, and only paying the minimum payment, I eventually have to bite the bullet and start paying the debt down or go bankrupt.
So, yeah, it sucks that there’s going to be some livelihood costs, but that’s not so much our fault now for trying to fix it as it is those who put us into this situation in the first place when they spent the money without a plan for paying it back. We do have an obligation to take that into account and try to minimize the cost and amortize it.
And as for pork spending, I don’t think the issue is so much that these projects happen as much as where the funding is coming from. In my opinion, money spent by the federal government should generally be things that benefit the country on a large scale. An obvious example for that is defense, where it just makes more sense to organize defense on a national level, since everyone benefits from it, but the actual cost per region will change, as in it costs a lot to defense the coast of Florida, but Kansas doesn’t need to worry about that. But if we’re talking about a bridge, it really only affects local people, so it doesn’t make sense to spread the cost out across the nation.
So, I’m not against building bridges or whatever, those are things that probably ought to be done by the government in general, but I don’t think they should generally be part of the budget of the federal government. If it got spread out more or less evenly, it wouldn’t be so bad, but part of the problem is that more powerful, longer tenured members of congress generally end up getting a larger amount of pork for their constituents. It keeps their constituents happy and keeps them getting elected, making them more powerful and them less likely to get replaced because a new guy would get less. It’s basically subsidized campaign spending. Let the people who gain the benefit incur the cost.
So, yeah, seeing this sequestoring haphazardly making cuts is as bad, possibly worse, than doing nothing, but doing nothing isn’t the right answer either. We have to make tough decisions, we have to make cuts, there will be real human costs paid, but the costs will only go up, so we better start doing something now.