Sequestration

Congress ... really? You can agree on giving AIG $85 billion in an emergency situation, but you can't agree on how to cut $85 billion during a non-emergency situation?

Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with cutting costs; even deep cuts, when necessary; but I would just prefer we did it the old fashioned way -- through smoke-filled, back-room politics.  Btw, did you think to cut your own pay before you headed home?

This from an Auburn.edu site entitled, A Glossary of Political Economy Terms: 

Sequestration

Originally a legal term referring generally to the act of valuable property being taken into custody by an agent of the court and locked away for safekeeping, usually to prevent the property from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved.

But the term has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure originally provided for in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 -- an effort to reform Congressional voting procedures so as to make the size of the Federal government's budget deficit a matter of conscious choice rather than simply the arithmetical outcome of a decentralized appropriations process in which no one ever looked at the cumulative results until it was too late to change them.

If the dozen or so appropriation bills passed separately by Congress provide for total government spending in excess of the limits Congress earlier laid down for itself in the annual Budget Resolution, and if Congress cannot agree on ways to cut back the total (or does not pass a new, higher Budget Resolution), then an "automatic" form of spending cutback takes place. This automatic spending cut is what is called "sequestration."