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Obama Decries ‘Dumb’ Cuts as US Fails to Avert Budget Drama

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US President Barack Obama on Friday criticized Republican leadership in the US Congress after the White House and lawmakers failed to secure a deal to halt a mandatory $85 billion in across-the-board federal budget cuts from going into effect at midnight.

WASHINGTON, March 1 (RIA Novosti) – US President Barack Obama on Friday criticized Republican leadership in the US Congress after the White House and lawmakers failed to secure a deal to halt a mandatory $85 billion in across-the-board federal budget cuts from going into effect at midnight.

“I am not a dictator, I’m the president. Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway,” Obama told a news conference Friday, referring to his brief meeting on the budget crisis with the Republican leaders in the US Senate and the House of Representatives, respectively.

This latest budget crisis—called “sequestration”—is set to go into effect from midnight Friday (0500 GMT Saturday) and could force layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal, state and local government employees in the coming months.

The automatic spending cuts would impact everything from defense spending to transportation, meat inspections, housing subsidies and government-funded child daycare centers.

Though the mandatory spending cuts take effect from Friday, economists say the brunt of the impact would not begin to be felt for months, leaving time for Republicans and Democrats to intensify their efforts to come up with a less drastic plan to address US budget woes.

“Let’s be clear—none of this is necessary. It’s happening because of a choice Republicans in Congress have made,” Obama told reporters. “They’ve allowed these cuts to happen because they’ve refused to budge on closing a single, wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit.”

The cuts, which Obama called “dumb” and “arbitrary,” were established by US lawmakers in 2011 as a sort of budgetary axe set to fall on the entire federal government should Congress fail to implement more than $1 trillion in fiscal cuts in a more considered way.

The idea was to make the threat of automatic cuts so alarming, so devastating, that both parties would be forced to find a more reasonable compromise.

At the heart of the negotiations has been a standoff over taxes. The Obama administration has insisted that the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes, while Republican lawmakers have said the country’s budget woes derive from excessive spending.

“It's about taking on the spending problem here in Washington,” Boehner said Friday.

McConnell, the Republican leader in the Democratic-controlled Senate, said in a statement Friday that Republicans had offered Obama “numerous solutions, including the flexibility he needs to secure those reductions more intelligently.”

“But there will be no last-minute, backroom deal and absolutely no agreement to increase taxes,” McConnell said.

 

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