Obama warned for months that the layoffs and pay cuts that would result from domestic and military spending cuts would slow the economy to a crawl, but few of those warnings have come to fruition since the sequester took effect on March 1.

“What’s happening is really reinforcing and reinvigorating a central conservative view that many of the activities of the federal government are not core competencies and could be better performed by others,” said Juleanna Glover, a Republican lobbyist and adviser to several major GOP figures such as President Bush, Vice President Cheney and former Sen. John Ashcroft. “The fact that we can see these 5 percent cuts are not really causing as much screaming and crying as we would all have expected is really invigorating to conservatives.”…

The cumulative effect of both types of cuts was also supposed to be dramatic. But more and more, Republicans seem comfortable with the fact that the economic impact of the cuts hasn’t been that great. The economy seems to be doing well for the first time in years.

“I don’t think taking 2 percent off the top in a $14 trillion economy is going to be a big drag on growth,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., when asked at a fiscal summit in Washington earlier this month whether the sequester had hurt the economy.