The last time any of us tried to use the tokens we received at arcades as spending money outside those arcades was probably when we were kids. Now, however, being slightly less naive adults, we wouldn’t try to pass off arcade tokens as quarters or dollar coins.

The thing about tokens is that they can’t be used outside of the establishment in which they were acquired. In the real world, they are useless.

President Barack Obama and a few other top federal officials, including Secretary of Agriculture and former Governor of Iowa Tom Vilsack, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder, among others, have made a similarly useless effort.

Unfortunately, their gesture to solidarity or comradeship with federal employees and other people affected by the budget sequester, which began to go into effect on March 1, is just an empty, token gesture that has no real meaning for solving the problem. Indeed, aside from verifying the idea that misery loves company, it does nothing to blunt the impact of the sequester or resolve it or find a way out of the nightmare that is the U.S. Government’s spending obligations.

With the national debt mounting (at time of writing, it stood at $16.8 trillion) to increasingly scary heights, it cannot be denied that spending reform is necessary. Given the various budget proposals floating around, that number seems likely to increase.

The U.S. Senate passed a budget in March that reduces the red ink that washes the federal government’s accounting books by $1.85 trillion — during the next 10 years. The U.S House of Representatives also passed a budget in March, and it would balance federal spending by eliminating $5 trillion in future spending — during the next 10 years. The White House also proposed a budget this week, which would cut $1 trillion in spending and increase revenue by $800 billion — during the next 10 years.

Some might say that sharp cuts that would balance the budget in less than a decade (five years, for example, or a much smaller amount of time that would pass when the currently elected Congress is still in office, since it is immoral for them to make law on the presumption that future congresses of the American people will abide by past decisions and not exercise the right to govern themselves) are irresponsible.

But the fact that the United States’ fiscal problems are now so steep that the only resolution is a decade away, is sad. It is lamentable, and it is tragic.

The people of the United States need to have an honest, sincere, comprehensive discussion about what their obligations are in the present (as fixed by current law), what they will be in future years if current programs (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Defense) do not change, and what they should be. Across the board spending cuts, such as those enacted by the sequester, make no judgments about where, exactly, the government should direct its resources.