Congress is working to hammer out details of the next budget agreement, and it’s likely that spending will increase. The 2011 sequester resulted from budget negotiations at that time, but both sides have been looking for ways to undo it ever since. Barack Obama’s favorite strategy is to make any kind of cuts – even those that merely reduce spending growth, not nominal spending – as painful as possible, particularly the defense cuts that were part of the sequester.

And those cuts were broad and unbalanced. Defense suffered cuts far exceeding its share of the budget, and Obama has targeted those cuts to deliberately weaken our military readiness. (For the record, however, the Department of Defense has a significant amount of waste, fraud and constant cost overruns. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, anyone?) Some House Republicans have already taken the bait and are trying to bust Obama’s spending caps, and Senate Republicans may follow suit when they take up the National Defense Authorization Act, which spends $54 million more than the caps.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is no fan of the defense cuts, but advocates keeping them because, he rightly points out, Obama will only accept increased military spending in exchange for higher taxes and/or increased spending on his own pet projects. For example, whenever entitlement reform comes up, the White House begins with a ransom demand: $1 trillion in tax hikes. And once again, Republicans are finding it difficult to present a unified front.

Obama’s latest trial balloon for negotiations would eliminate the debt ceiling, which he called a “loaded gun.” He also said, “We’re probably better off with a system in which that threat is not there on a perpetual basis.” Actually, we’re undoubtedly better off with a government that institutes fair taxation and then spends within its means, but there’s no chance of that any time soon, either.