WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama stepped up pressure on Congress to avert “brutal” automatic $1.2 trillion in budget cuts set to kick in March 1, saying they would harm the economy and curtail vital services.
Obama said Tuesday that if the spending reductions take effect, the United States may lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, military readiness would be damaged, aid to state and local governments would shrink, and the ability of the government to respond to natural disasters or other emergencies will be diminished.
If lawmakers can’t agree on a broad deal to replace the across-the-board spending reductions, Congress should “at minimum” pass a temporary, smaller package that provides more time for negotiations, Obama said in Washington.
“Nobody should want these cuts to go through,” he said in a White House auditorium, where he was surrounded by blue-uniformed emergency responders to illustrate some of the jobs threatened if the cuts take effect.
By law, the cuts, spread over nine years, would be equally divided between defense and nondefense spending. While both parties agree that the cuts may damage thee conomic recovery and hamper national security, neither side has shown movement to break the impasse as the deadline nears.
Obama cautioned that if the $85 billion in immediate cuts - known as the sequester - occur, the full range of government will feel the effects. Among those he listed: furloughed FBI agents, reductions in spending for communities to pay police and fire personnel and teachers, and decreased ability to respond to threats around the world.
He said the consequences will be felt economically across the nation.
“People will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again,” he said.
“So far at least, the ideas that the Republicans have proposed ask nothing of the wealthiest Americans or the biggest corporations,” Obama said. “So the burden is all on the first responders, or seniors or middle-class families.”
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said the Ohio Republican agrees that the sequester is a bad way to reduce spending but put the onus for averting the cuts on Democrats.
“A solution now requires the Senate - controlled by the president’s party - to finally pass a plan of their own,” spokesman Brendan Buck said.
Obama spoke hours after the leaders of his 2010 deficit commission offered a $2.4 trillion plan to reduce the debt. The proposal by Democrat Erskine Bowles, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Republican Alan Simpson, a former senator from Wyoming, would accomplish debt savings over 10 years in steps, rather than through one major piece of legislation.
The first two steps of their four-step approach have already taken place. First there were spending cuts enacted as part of the 2011 deal to increase the debt limit.
And then there was increased revenue from an agreement enacted Jan. 2 to allow a temporary payroll tax cut to expire and to increase tax rates on annual household incomes of more than $450,000.
Bowles and Simpson said the next step is to enact entitlement-program and tax changes to produce about $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction and replace the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts.
The plan calls for reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by about $600 billion by, among other things, raising premiums on high earners.
Bowles and Simpson also want to overhaul the tax code by eliminating or scaling back most deductions, using some of the savings - about $600 billion - to reduce the deficit and some to lower tax rates.
On top of that, the plan would reduce spending by another $1.2 trillion over the next decade through a combination of mandatory spending cuts and other changes, such as altering the way annual Social Security cost-of-living increases are calculated.
The fourth step is to take action to make Social Security and highway funding solvent and Medicare sustainable.
“The problem is real, the solutions are painful, and there is no easy way out,” the two said in a summary of their plan. “What we are calling for is by no means perfect, but it could serve as a mark for realbipartisan negotiations on a plan to reduce the deficit and grow the economy.
“It is time for our country to put this ultra-partisanship aside and pull together, not apart,” they said.
The U.S. economy stalled during the last three months of 2012, marking the worst quarter since the recession ended 3 1/2 years ago, as defense spending tumbled by the most since 1972.
Obama returned to Washington on Monday night after spending the weekend playing golf with people, including Tiger Woods at Floridian, a private course and club in Palm City, Fla. Congress is not in session this week, meaning no votes can occur before next week.
The president said Tuesday that he would insist on combining higher revenue through the tax code with spending cuts that won’t harm the economy. He said cutting alone would hinder growth.
“Deficit reduction is not an economic plan,” he said.
Republicans said they willstand firm in opposing any plan to avert the cuts that relies on revenue to close the budget gaps, and they’ve accused Obama of failing to offer specifics.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky released a statement before Obama spoke accusing the president of engaging in political posturing rather than negotiations.
“Today’s event at the White House proves once again that more than three months after the November election, President Obama still prefers campaign events to common sense, bipartisan action,” McConnell said in an e-mailed statement.
Obama has said he wants to curb tax breaks for top earners and change the treatment of profits in buyout deals, known as carriedinterest. He has also said he’s willing to work on trimming costs in the Medicare health insurance plan for the elderly by cutting payments to drug companies, raising premiums for the wealthy and changing medical-reimbursement procedures.
Senate Democrats have proposed delaying the automatic reductions by 10 months. Their alternative $110 billion plan would cut defense spending, end direct aid payments to farmers and set a minimum income-tax rate on top earners.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the automatic cutbacks could subtract 0.6 percent from the gross domestic product’s growth this year, enough to eliminate 750,000 jobs.
Information for this article was contributed by Margaret Talev, Roger Runningen, Jeff Plungis and Heidi Przybyla of Bloomberg News; by Julie Pace and Jim Kuhnhenn of The Associated Press; by Jackie Calmes of The New York Times; and by Jim Puzzanghera of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/20/2013