Barack Obama might prefer to focus his energies on immigration, gun control and education. But it is the tax and spending wars that still paralyse Washington, and the US is on the verge of a dismal solution – the sequestration. Unless a new budget deal can be agreed within the next few days, almost all forms of so-called “discretionary” spending, departmental budgets that the US Congress sets each year, will be cut equally and indiscriminately – beginning next week.

But cutting discretionary spending is like invading Iraq when the attack came from Afghanistan. Everyone knows that the federal spending problem involves the soaring cost of healthcare entitlements, which are not covered by the sequestration. The share of US gross domestic product consumed by Medicare alone is projected to rise from 3.7 per cent today to 6.7 per cent in 25 years. Meanwhile, discretionary spending is declining as a share of economic output, and it is already being subjected to a $1.1tn 10-year cut that was initiated in 2011.

The manner of the $1.2tn, nine-year sequestration, which also includes defence spending, is wrong-headed. Each area of the discretionary budget will be forced to share the cuts equally. How bad is this? Imagine a hospital deciding to cut every department by an equal amount. Oncology and cardiology would be reduced as much as cosmetic surgery. No medical institution would ever do this. Life-or-death areas would be cut last.