The across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration will take effect today. So what does $85 billion sliced out of the federal government’s fiscal year 2013 budget feel like?

By the numbers, not much. The cuts represent just a small part of the overall budget and will be implemented incrementally, so the immediate pain will be felt most by federal workers who are furloughed and contractors as contracts are trimmed. There will be some pain, but not across-the-board, unlike the cuts. And it’s the across-the-board nature of these cuts that will make them painful, much more so than the final dollar amount. For instance, at the end of ten years of these cuts the Pentagon budget will be at 2007 levels and still exceed the cold war average.

Both parties say they are opposed to sequestration but despite the President’s barnstorming tour and House Republicans’ grandstanding, neither side has offered a credible alternative.

In the Senate, Republicans offered a proposal that would give the White House the power to make the decisions regarding what to cut and how much, with no more than half coming from the Pentagon and the rest from everything else. At least they say that’s what it would do. In reality, the bill restricts the Pentagon cuts to be “consistent with amounts authorized in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013” which means the Pentagon (that comprises of more than half of the discretionary budget) would get cut little if at all, and everything else, a lot. It includes other limits on the President’s discretion as well. So it would have given the President a scalpel with which to cut, but tied his hands.

The Senate Democrats also came in with a bad proposal: a passel of cuts and revenue raisers that would take ten years to offset one year of sequester cuts. It’s budgeting like that, that got us in our current fiscal situation. It’s like Wimpy from Popeye, I will gladly pay you in ten years to get rid of cuts today. Furthermore, the package would have locked in more federal agriculture spending by cutting a few egregious subsidies that were already promised to be cut, while preserving others and protecting farm spending from any future sequestration cuts, and setting the table for expanded farm subsidies in the next farm bill. In fact, the package cut less in agriculture subsidies than either the House or Senate Farm bills from last year.

Well, we don’t have to worry about the bad Senate plans. They both failed in separate votes yesterday.

So we’re back to square one and the House and Senate leaders are heading to the White House to chat about sequestration.

There’s no getting around the fact that the across-the-board cuts in sequestration are a stupid way to budget. But simply turning them off and going back to business as usual is not an option either. Lawmakers have to sit down and make the hard choices. We came up with $2 trillion in deficit reduction in our report last year, Sliding Past Sequestration. The ten year budget cut number envisioned in sequestration is $1.2 trillion. That’s a small fraction of what the government is planning to spend over that time.

Starting a diet and exercise plan is never easy. But if lawmakers can’t even come up with $85 billion in deficit reduction this year, how can we ever think they will reform entitlements or do fundamental tax reform.