WASHINGTON, March 2, (Agencies): President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans refused Saturday to concede any culpability for failing to stave off huge, automatic spending cuts - what both parties acknowledged was a foolhardy way to slash $85 billion in federal spending.

The still-fragile US economy braced itself for the gradual but potentially grave impact of the across-the-board cuts, which took effect Friday night at the stroke of Obama’s pen. Hours earlier, he and congressional leaders emerged from a White House meeting no closer to an agreement.

Even as they pledged a renewed effort to retroactively undo the spending cuts, both parties said the blame rests squarely on the other for any damage the cuts might inflict. There were no indications that either side was wavering from entrenched positions that for weeks had prevented progress on a deal to find a way out: Republicans refusing any deal with more tax revenue and Democrats snubbing any deal without it.

“None of this is necessary,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. “It’s happening because Republicans in Congress chose this outcome over closing a single wasteful tax loophole that helps reduce the deficit.”

The president said the cuts would cause “a ripple effect across the economy” that would worsen the longer they stay in place, eventually costing more than 750,000 jobs and disrupting the lives of middle-class families.

Battling
Obama and the Republican leadership have been battling over federal spending since the opposition party regained a majority in the House of Representatives more than two years ago. The crude, across-the-board budget reductions were conceived in 2011 to be so unattractive that both sides would be forced to find a better deal. They haven’t despite two years to find a compromise.

The $85 billion in cuts apply to the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year, which ends Sept 30. But the legislation that requires the spending reduction will continue slashing government spending by about $1 trillion more over a 10-year period.

In the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the party’s lawmakers washed their hands of the mess, arguing that bills they passed in the last Congress to avert the cuts absolved them of any responsibility. Those bills passed with little to no Democratic support and were never taken up by the Senate.

“We’ve done the work and shown that these choices can be made in a responsible, thoughtful way,” said Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington in the weekly Republican address.

Obama was holding out hope that as Americans start feeling the effects of the sequester - Washington’s term used for the automatic spending cuts - public pressure will force lawmakers back to the table. Ever wary that such fiscal fiascos could jeopardize the rest of his second-term agenda, Obama vowed in his weekly address to keep pushing reforms on immigration, preschool, gun violence and transportation.
But attention was already turning to the next major budget hurdles, with less than a month to negotiate a plan to fund the government beyond March 27 and a debt-ceiling clash coming in May.

Hopes that a measure to undo the spending cuts could be wrapped into a March deal to keep the government running dimmed Friday when both Obama and House Speaker John Boehner said they’d prefer to keep the two issues separate.

“I’m hopeful that we won’t have to deal with the threat of a government shutdown while we’re dealing with the sequester at the same time,” Boehner said.

Boehner said Friday the House will pass legislation next week to extend routine funding for government agencies beyond the current March 27 expiration.

Obama said he, too, wanted to keep the two issues separate.

In May, Congress will confront a renewed standoff on increasing the government’s borrowing limit - the same the issue that, two years ago, spawned the law forcing the current spending cuts in the first place.
Failure to raise the borrowing limit could force the US to default on debt for the first time in history.
The immediate impact of the spending cuts on the public was uncertain.

The Pentagon will absorb half of the $85 billion required to be sliced between now and the end of the budget year on Sept 30, exposing civilian workers to furloughs and defense contractors to possible cancellations. Said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, only a few days on the job: “We will continue to ensure America’s security” despite the challenge posed by an “unnecessary budget crisis.”
It isn’t clear how long the cuts will last.

Of particular concern to lawmakers in both parties is a lack of flexibility in the allocation of cuts due to take effect over the next few months. That problem will ease beginning with the new budget year on Oct. 1, when Congress and the White House will be able to negotiate changes in the way the reductions are made.

For his part, Obama suggested he was content to leave them in place until Republicans change their minds about raising taxes by closing loopholes.

Many conservatives are willing to accept the cuts as the only way to reduce government spending, even though the budget knife cuts into cherished defense programs.

With severe spending cuts now etched into law, Obama urged Congress Saturday to find a deficit-trimming alternative that avoids what he has likened to using a meat cleaver.

Obama advocated what he called a balanced approach to replace across the board cuts of $85 billion in federal spending this year, blending “smart” cuts with reforms.

The so-called sequester mandated cuts were never actually meant to go into effect when it was fashioned in a deal with Congress in 2011.

The drastic cuts are not expected to be immediate or uniform across the country or from one government department to another.

Economists have warned that the cuts could cost many jobs and hinder growth in the still fragile US economy. But the realization is sinking in that despite the perils they bring, the cuts are here to stay — at least for now.

In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, the president argued however there was still time to find a smarter solution to the nation’s deficit and debt problem.

“I still believe we can and must replace these cuts with a balanced approach — one that combines smart spending cuts with entitlement reform and changes to our tax code that make it more fair for families and businesses without raising anyone’s tax rates,” Obama said.

These were allusions to Obama’s willingness to trim spending on programs like medical care for the elderly and the poor, something which is anathema to many in his Democratic Party, and Obama’s drive to close tax loopholes he says benefit the rich.

Republicans, who ceded to Obama in another budget showdown late last year and allowed taxes on the rich to go up, have said point blank that any deficit reduction now has to come from spending cuts, exclusively.

Obama said the budget deficit now exceeding $1 trillion can be reduced without laying off workers or forcing parents and students to pay the price.

“A majority of the American people agree with me on this approach - including a majority of Republicans,” the president argued.

“We just need Republicans in Congress to catch up with their own party and the rest of the country.”
Under the sequester, 800,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department will go on a mandatory furlough one day a week and the navy will trim voyages. The deployment of a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf has been canceled.

Defense contractors may be forced to lay off workers and some federal health spending could be hit.
Cuts will also be made to special needs education and preschool for less well-off children. National parks could close and wait times could hit four hours at airport customs posts.

But the president insisted that despite public bickering, Republicans and Democrats actually had more in common than they were willing to let on.

Some Republicans have charged that the Obama administration is overstating the impact of the sequester, arguing it will not be so bad in the end.

A cartoon published Saturday in The Washington Post, entitled “Sequester Day”, illustrated this slice of the latest bipartisan battle to engulf gridlocked Washington. It featured three vignettes: the sun rising, a sailboat on a calm seas and the Earth staying in orbit.

“Told you,” says an elephant, the symbol of the Republican Party.

“Just wait,” retorts Obama, his arms crossed and looking miffed.

On Friday, hours before signing the cuts into law as he had to, Obama blamed the austerity time bomb on Republicans, who he said refused to close tax loopholes for the rich and corporations, combined with more targeted spending cuts, in his “balanced” approach to deficit reduction.

“I am not a dictator. I’m the president,” Obama said, warning he could not force his Republican foes to “do the right thing,” or make the Secret Service barricade Republicans leaders in a room until a deal is done.

“These cuts will hurt our economy, will cost us jobs and to set it right both sides need to be able to compromise,” Obama said, before decrying the budget trimming as “dumb” and “unnecessary.”
Only three months after winning re-election, and with the extent of his authority in Washington again constrained, Obama bemoaned his inability to do a “Jedi mind-meld” to get Republicans to change their minds, mixing imagery from Star Wars and Star Trek.

The hit to military and domestic spending was never supposed to happen, but was rather a device seen as so punishing that rival lawmakers would be forced to find a better compromise to cut the deficit.
Both sides agree that the sequester is a blunt instrument to cut spending, as it does not distinguish between essential and wasteful programs — in what Obama has branded a “meat-cleaver” approach.
New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that the sequester could endanger the military’s capacity to conduct its missions.