Spending Cuts, Automatic Budget Cuts | featured news

Speaking after meeting with congressional leaders, President Barack Obama said Friday the budget cuts slated to go into effect today are the "choice" of Republicans who stonewalled any compromise to avert them.

Across-the-board spending cuts all but certain, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are staging a politically charged showdown designed to avoid public blame for any resulting inconvenience or disruption in government services.

While White House strategists believe that Republicans will be blamed as the cuts’ effects slowly emerge, President Obama risks political damage if Americans end up just shrugging at the reductions.

...Unlike their predecessors, today’s leaders have models on how to revive depressed economies. The example of Franklin Roosevelt, whose public investments in jobs and defense turned the U.S. economy around, and the writings of John Maynard Keynes, who demonstrated that the solution to depression is boosting demand, are plain for all to see. Seeing isn’t believing, however, when ideology dims the eye.

The nation’s capital was enveloped in a familiar kind of gridlock late Monday, as Republicans again demanded that President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats act first to put off $85 billion in automatic cuts slated to take effect on Friday.

So it's looking more and more like Republicans will propose an alternative to the sequester: It would kick in, but Obama administration agency heads would have control to reallocate where the cuts hit at their discretion, so they're not imposed in a slap-dash across-the-board fashion. Among those suggesting this idea: National Review and Karl Rove.

People traveling to the nation's parks this spring will find fewer rangers on the job and reduced hours at visitors' centers if the government enacts sweeping budget cuts. Camping and hiking areas might also be closed when the National Park Service cuts $130 million from its $2.6 billion budget under sequestration measures set to start at the end of March.

Just as computers worldwide did not crash on Jan. 1, 2000, in the "Y2K" scare and Earth itself did not shatter on Dec. 21, 2012, as some interpreters of the Mayan calendar predicted, March 1, 2013, will not be remembered as the day the U.S. government disintegrated.

House Speaker John Boehner and a top aide to President Obama are duking it out in competing columns over who is to blame for the sequester. "It is a product of the president's own failed leadership," wrote Boehner in The Wall Street Journal, nine days before the sequester -- $85 billion in automatic budget cuts -- kick in.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is telling Congress that if automatic budget cuts kick in on March 1 he may be compelled to furlough the "vast majority" of the Defense Department's 800,000 civilian workers....