As I mentioned in an earlier post, President Obama's press conference on Tuesday covered several topics, one of the most interesting of which concerned the budget cuts known as sequestration. Other than blaming congressional Republicans for not wanting to talk about raising taxes further because of politics -- as if congressional Democrats have refused to seriously consider reforms to Medicare and Social Security that would mean far more to the country's long-term fiscal health -- the gist of his remarks was this:

"It is true that the sequester is in place right now. It’s damaging our economy, it’s hurting our people, and we need to lift it. What’s clear is the only way we’re going to lift it is if we do a bigger deal that meets the test of lowering our deficit and growing our economy at the same time." (emphasis added)

I think he has it exactly backward here.

The "solution" to sequestration -- a very broad-based budget cut -- is not to remove it root and branch, even from those budget programs where it appears to be working fine, and replace it with something else broad-based. To the degree something needs to be "fixed," as in the case of the FAA's furloughed air-traffic controllers, it's far preferable to address that one, narrow problem without touching everything else (even if, as I've argued before, the Obama administration already had the flexibility it needed to avoid that problem).

In his press conference, the president mentioned three public problems that had emerged due to sequestration: the cancellation of White House tours (which was widely and correctly panned as a ham-fisted, unnecessary, disproportionate attempt to make the public feel the effect of budget cuts); the furloughing of meat inspectors, which Congress addressed; and the FAA case, which has also been addressed. Maybe Obama could have come up with more. But even if he had named five or six, or 10, or 20, that wouldn't justify restoring the only substantial budget cuts we've gotten in years, or replacing them with a hodgepodge of tax increases.

In fact, addressing those problems posed by sequestration ought to be a template for how Washington tackles other problems: Fight the constant urge to "go big" and instead focus on those things that can be done now. Better to pass two or three smaller bills between now and the end of 2014 addressing, say, immigration than to spend months wrangling over a comprehensive bill that might not even pass in the end.