Until average Americans feel the cuts, neither side looks willing to budge. The age of austerity?

The era of austerity may have arrived.

President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are dug in on the sequester, and there are no signs of a quick fix to the $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts that both sides say they disdain.


That could certainly change after a few bad months of economic numbers or a public outcry. But until average Americans feel the cuts, neither side looks willing to budge on the key issue of revenues without some game-changing factor. And neither party is inclined to risk a government shutdown on sequester politics.

“I don’t think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) conceded in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

( PHOTOS: How sequestration could affect you)

Below are POLITICO’S three possible scenarios for how the next several weeks play out.

Sequester is here to stay

The cuts were designed in 2011 to be so onerous that nobody would want to keep them in place.

But 18 months and several unfulfilling budget battles later, Republicans came to accept sequestration as the only guaranteed way to slice the government’s bottom line. And maybe, just maybe, it won’t be as bad as Obama, Democrats, independent economists and even many Republicans expect.

( PHOTOS: What they’re saying about sequestration)

Boehner penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month claiming the sequester “threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more,” but he backtracked a bit on “Meet the Press,” saying, “I don’t know whether it’s going to hurt the economy or not.”

Congress could take up measures to ease the impact, possibly with legislation giving department heads the ability to better target the cuts.

A Republican-sponsored bill aimed at this goal failed in the Senate last week, but a Senate Democratic leadership aide said it could be rewritten to attract Democrats, particularly those from military states, who would be anxious to show constituents that they’re doing something — even if it puts them at odds with the president. House Republicans are planning to also vote on a bill with language to help make the budget cuts more manageable for the military and veterans.

But administration officials argue that even the added flexibility wouldn’t change the bottom line.

“There is no way that you can move the deck chairs around in a way that will not cost our economy, as [the Congressional Budget Office] projects, 750,000 jobs,” White House economics adviser Gene Sperling said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “When you have those types of harsh spending cuts in such a short, concentrated period of time, it is like saying to somebody, ‘You can cut off three of your fingers, but you can have the flexibility to choose which ones you want to cut off.’”

( Also on POLITICO: What is sequestration?)

If the sequester stays in place through the end of the fiscal year in September, it would mark a new era in Washington: a temporary stall in emergency budget wars, which have dominated Washington since Republicans took over the House in 2011.

The debt limit won’t need to be raised until May at the earliest — that could even stretch until August, according to calculations by some top-level aides. And the prevailing wisdom in the Capitol is that House Republicans cannot demand anything in exchange for extending the country’s borrowing authority. Democrats argue that the GOP lost the right do that when it agreed to lift the ceiling in January without insisting on an equal amount of cuts.

Ironically, with the sequester deadline behind him, Obama is able to move on to other items on his second-term agenda. Senior administration officials insist the president will focus as much time on immigration, guns and climate change as he does on making his case against the sequester.

Republicans may have the most to lose. They don’t agree with much of Obama’s agenda. And if the economy falls back into recession, polls show that the GOP will be blamed.

But for now, Republicans are holding firm.

“I’m absolutely confident we’re going to reduce spending the amount of money we promised the American people we would in a law the president signed a year and a half ago,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We said we’re open to discussing how to reconfigure those spending reductions without raising taxes.”

A short-term fix

At this point, sequestration is a nonevent. It’s not the apocalypse that Obama portrayed early in his public relations offensive last month.

“Nobody ever suggested that this harmful sequester, which the speaker himself said would be devastating to national security, was going to have all its impact in the first few days,” Sperling said. “It is a slow grind.”

But what could drive Republicans back into negotiations with the White House is deep economic pain, an unforeseen event or widespread inconvenience for average Americans.

It could be a sharp uptick in the unemployment rate, a tumble in the stock market or a voter uprising akin to the health care town halls in 2009. Defense contractors in Northern Virginia, California and Maryland would need to lay off people in droves. Farmers, who hold sway over rural Democrats and a broad swath of the Republican Party, could feel squeezed because of the cuts in agriculture subsidies.

The closure of national parks and long lines at airports could dominate media attention. A terrorist attack, a spate of food-borne illnesses or a national disaster would set off a debate about the role that the cuts played in government readiness.

From a political standpoint, public polling would need to push either side to completely reverse its position. Congressional Republicans would be more sensitive to that since they’re trying to keep the House and snatch the majority in the Senate.

This is where the continuing resolution could become a vehicle for fixing the sequester.

The White House ruled out a fight with Congress on the stopgap measure to keep the government funded past the end of the month because it would’ve sidetracked efforts to overhaul the immigration system and gun laws. Obama could have threatened a veto of the government funding bill if the sequester cuts weren’t reversed by then, but he said Friday that he wouldn’t do that because it would precipitate another crisis.

Congress, however, is still trying to figure out whether it can use the continuing resolution to change the sequester. The House plans to act this week on a bill that would increase funding for the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) has discussed moving an omnibus budget bill that rearranges the sequester cuts.

But the deadline for passage of the budget resolution without a government shutdown is March 27 — so there’s not much time for such pressure to work.

Whether it’s by the end of March or at some point later, a short-term deal could come together if Republicans accept tax increases or Obama relents on his demand for more revenues.

Neither seems likely.

GOP leaders insist that won’t happen after they agreed to $600 billion in hikes in January. But there is a mostly silent wing of the Republican Party that wants to close tax loopholes to help offset the cuts — a faction that Obama continues to work. He made calls Saturday to Republican senators, White House officials said. These Republicans aren’t opposed to closing those tax loopholes as part of a broad Tax Code overhaul.

“Our hope is that, as more Republicans start to see this pain in their own districts, that they will choose bipartisan compromise over this absolutist position,” Sperling said.

Big deal

In this age of rigid partisanship, there is a sense on Capitol Hill that something resembling a grand bargain is still possible.

Yes, seriously.

The thinking goes like this:

For the first time in years, the Senate will join the House in passing a budget. Although they are nonbinding, if both budgets include reconciliation instructions for tax and entitlement reform, an environment could develop that would lead to a massive deficit reduction passage.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are yearning to put their imprimatur on the Tax Code.

Some senior administration officials concede that a grand bargain could be the best bet for canceling the sequester. With both parties refusing to back off their position on taxes, a comprehensive deal that spreads the pain and gain may be the only way out, the officials said.

“After we do our continuing resolution, we’ll begin the work on our budget. The House has done a budget every year that I’ve been speaker. The Senate hasn’t done a budget for four years,” Boehner said Sunday. “They’ve committed to do a budget this year. And I hope that they do. And out of that discussion, out of that process, maybe we can find a way to deal with our long-term spending problem.”