Just hours after across-the-board spending cuts officially took effect, President Barack Obama pressed Congress on Saturday to work with him on a compromise to halt a fiscal crisis he said was starting to “inflict pain" on communities across the United States. Obama and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders failed on Friday to avoid the deep spending reductions known as the “sequester," which automatically kicked in overnight in the latest sign of dysfunction in a divided Washington. “These cuts are not smart," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “They will hurt our economy and cost us jobs. And Congress can turn them off at any time - as soon as both sides are willing to compromise." As Obama and his aides have done for weeks, the president in his radio address offered a litany of hardships he said would flow from the sequester, saying, “Severe budget cuts ... have already started to inflict pain on communities across the country." “Beginning this week, businesses that work with the military will have to lay folks off. Communities near military bases will take a serious blow. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who serve their country - Border Patrol agents, FBI agents, civilians who work for the Defense Department - will see their wages cut and their hours reduced," he said. “The longer these cuts remain in place, the greater the damage," he said. “Economists estimate they could eventually cost us more than 750,000 jobs and slow our economy by over one-half of one percent." Obam a appealed for Republicans to work with Democrats on a deal, saying Americans were weary of seeing Washington “careen from one manufactured crisis to another." But he offered no new ideas to resolve the situation, and there was no immediate sign of any negotiations planned over the weekend. “There's a caucus of common sense (in Congress)," Obama said. “And I'm going to keep reaching out to them to fix this for good."
