Post date: Feb 26, 2013 10:8:59 PM
President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner engage in a war of words as they make their cases in Washington's budget cut standoff.
NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES (FEBRUARY 26, 2013) (RESTRICTED POOL) - President Barack Obama took his case for softening the effect of deep budget cuts to a shipyard town dependent on defense contracting on Tuesday (February 26), but there was little sign he will be able to halt automatic cuts from starting this week.
"These cuts are wrong. They are not smart, they're not fair. They are a self-inflicted wound that doesn't have to happen," he told workers in Newport News, Virginia.He was speaking in front of a huge submarine propeller at the Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard where scheduled maintenance to the aircraft carrier USSAbraham Lincoln has been delayed due to the budget crisis.
It was the latest event staged by the White House to warn of the possible damage to public services - from less child care to air travel chaos - from the $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts that are due to begin on Friday.
An agreement in Congress would halt the cuts but with days to go before the ax starts to fall the two parties do not agree on what to replace them with.
"There are too many Republicans in Congress right now who refuse to compromise even an inch when it comes to closing tax loopholes and special interest tax breaks and that's what holding things up right now," Obama said.
Republicans seek different, more targeted, spending cuts than entailed in "sequestration," as the automatic cuts are known in Washington budget parlance. They complain that Obama is overplaying worries about sequestration to promote long-held plans to close tax loopholes.
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner accused Obama of using "our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes."
"For sixteen months the President has been traveling all over the country holding rallies instead of sitting down with Senate leaders in order to try and forge an agreement over there in order to move a bill. We have moved a bill in the House twice, we should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something," Boehner said.
In a sign of how far they are from halting sequestration, congressional Republicans and the White House have been trying to blame each other for the cuts, which both Democrats and Republicans agreed to in a 2011 plan to fix an earlier budget crisis.
With a trip to a defense-heavy region of the country, Obama is seeking to draw attention to how the cuts would play out in communities where the military is a major source of jobs.
The sequestration cuts apply in equal measure to non-defense spending and defense spending, which makes up 9.8 percent of Virginia's gross domestic product.
The reductions will force the Pentagon to put most of its 800,000 civilian employees on unpaid leave for 22 days, slash ship and aircraft maintenance and curtail training, Defense Department officials have told Congress. Pentagon contracting and acquisitions personnel were authorized last week to consult with their industry counterparts about the upcoming spending cuts.