Budget Cuts, Sequester | featured news

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.

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.

Ten days before a new deadline for broad, automatic government spending cuts, the sense of urgency that surrounded other recent fiscal crises is absent. Government agencies are preparing to absorb an $85 billion hit to their budgets, and politicians, at least for now, seem willing to accept the consequences...

President Obama, back from his three-day golf getaway, on Monday made use of his bully pulpit, while Congress remains out all week, to turn up the pressure for a bipartisan agreement to avoid indiscriminate across-the-board budget cuts that will otherwise hit March 1.