Finally the correct word is being used for sequester: Austerity. Government and private forecasters expect austerity, in the form of the spending cuts and tax increases, to take a big bite: about 142,000 fewer jobs a month for the rest of the year than would otherwise be added. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/federal-austeritys-bite-on-job-growth/?hp  That’s more than the 134,000 jobs that employers added each month last year, on average.  “Clearly, the labor market was in decent shape before the sequester began and before the impact of the Jan. 1 payroll tax hike started to work through,”The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that the payroll tax increase would cost about 800,000 jobs this year, or about 67,000 a month. Sequestration, the office estimates, will in turn cost about 750,000 jobs over the remaining 10 months of the year – or about 75,000 jobs a month. Private economic forecasters have offered similar estimates. Macroeconomic Advisers predicted that sequestration would cost about 700,000 jobs, with most of the missed opportunities falling in the second and third quarters. On the one hand, these estimates suggest that without federal austerity, the economy might have added more than 300,000 jobs in February. That would have been a good month even by the robust standards of the 1990s.