by ANDY SEVILA
“Unfortunately, President Obama appears more focused on playing a sequestration blame game than on preventing spending cuts that would hurt the economy,” Congressman Lamar Smith said in a statement about automatic budget cuts that were triggered after Democrat and Republican leaders remained stagnant in the ever-present budget faceoff.
President Barack Obama ordered the $85 billion cuts in U.S. government spending Friday night after Washington leaders failed to reach a deal to thwart the automatic reductions brokered in 2011.
Officials now will have to adjust budgets through October making way for the monetary slashing to take hold.
“Not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away. The pain though will be real,” MSNBC reported Obama as telling journalists in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on March 1, shortly after meeting with Congressional leadership. “Beginning this week, many middle-class families will have their lives disrupted in significant ways.”
Sarah Dohl, spokesperson for local Congressman Lloyd Doggett, said the immediate local impacts are still “not 100% clear,” but did announce that public schools will be impacted.
“I think we should be looking at a combination of revenue and more reasoned spending cuts instead of slashing everything from the Border Patrol to educational assistance so students can achieve their full potential and so our public schools have a little bit of help after the devastating cuts of Governor Perry and those that are pending in the Legislature now,” Doggett, who represents the eastern portion of Hays County along Interstate 35, said in a statement. “I’d say let’s get a little revenue from the giant oil companies, by closing some of their tax loopholes.”
On the White House website, President Obama lays out a plan that “will avoid the sequestration’s harmful budget cuts and reduce the deficit in a balanced way – by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and closing tax loopholes.” The website states that the President believes focus should be aimed at growing the economy and strengthening the middle class.
However, Smith, who represents a central north-to-south strip of Hays County, said Obama has not proposed specific budget cuts to help avert sequestration.
“The (sequestration) cuts are regrettable but avoidable,” Smith said. “House Republicans have twice passed legislation that would have avoided sequestration cuts. The Senate has not passed a single bill to avoid the cuts. Sequestration was the White House’s idea.And yet the President hasn’t proposed any specific spending cuts to help avert sequestration.”
Doggett, echoing Obama, said spending cuts alone are not the solution to the nation’s economic challenges. He said revenue, too, is paramount in finding “balance,” with Doggett calling on the public for support.
“It will take determined efforts to overcome Republican intransigence to solve that problem and we need the continued input and counsel and demands of a concerned public to get Republicans to work with us to resolve the economic challenges we face in a balanced way where everyone participates in resolving the problem”
According to the White House website, the sequester will cut afterschool and other programs for nearly 1.2 million kids, eliminate more than 4 million meals for sick and homebound seniors, eliminate jobs for 30,000 teachers and school staff and cut funding for thousands of first responders, among other things. The defense department is expected to take the brunt of the automatic cuts.
“The whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth,” Obama is quoted as saying on the White House website. “And so this was all designed to say we can’t do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration.”
Congressman Roger Williams, whose district includes western Hays County, said on the House floor that the sequester, whom he attributes to Obama, “is bad for America.”
“There’s no getting around it. Good programs are going to be cut, good people are going to be furloughed, and bad leadership from President Obama is to blame,” Williams said. “In the last 4 years, almost every important budget deadline has been met with impasse, and little has been done to enact a responsible budget. Systematic failure to perform the most basic responsibilities of governing has led us to the catastrophic sequestration.”
The sequestration, however, was led to by both parties’ failure to reach a budget deal. Republicans have voiced strong opposition against tax increases, while Democrats have fought for a combination of tax jumps for the wealthier Americans and lowered spending.
“I believe such a balanced approach that combines tax reform with some additional spending reforms, done in a smart, thoughtful way is the best way to finish the job of deficit reduction and avoid these cuts once and for all that could hurt our economy, slow our recovery, put people out of work. And most Americans agree with me,” Obama said on the White House website.
