Word comes that Barack Obama’s budget will, not surprisingly, call for ending the sequester spending limits now in effect. That’s not surprising. White House aides proposed the sequester, but Obama thought it wouldn’t go into effect because Republicans couldn’t accept its sharp limits on defense spending. But with voters recoiling against foreign military involvement, they could and did.

At the time, Keynesian economists predicted that the sequester — “austerity” — would squelch economic growth. And they predicted that Republicans’ failure to continue extending unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks would result in mass misery.