House Of Representatives, Automatic Budget Cuts | 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.

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.

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.

Top Republican lawmaker John Boehner said on Wednesday that he would oppose any delay in the automatic budget cuts that are set to kick in March 1, without other spending cuts and reforms.