Obama Proposes 3-Year Spending Freeze... Sort Of

It seems that Obama lives in a world of sort-of's, where "acting in the middle" is really taking a bold stance on the issues... at least where budgetary matters are concerned. He wants very badly to be seen as a budget hawk concerned with trimming out-of-control deficits, but he also wants to spend everything he can on his pet projects.

To that end, PresBo plans to announce soon his plan to freeze Federal spending for the next three years. Sort of. Again, this is maybe-man we're talking about. The "spending freeze" wouldn't affect defense or foreign aid or spending on intelligence, homeland security or veterans. It also wouldn't affect entitlement programs such as medicare, medicaid, and social security. In other words, it would affect a midget-sized 17% chunk of the Federal budget.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31989.html

President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up to Wednesday's State of the Union address, Hill Democratic sources familiar with the plan tell POLITICO.

The move, intended to blunt the populist backlash against Obama's $787 billion stimulus and an era of trillion-dollar deficits — and to quell Democratic anxiety over last Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate election — is projected to save $250 billion, the Democrats said.

Okay, there are two aspects of this I want to look at.


This is like those commercials that make fuzzy claims like "50% more power" without bothering to say 50% more than WHAT. In this case, it's projected to "save" $250 billion... from what? President Bush's last budget ran a deficit of $400 billion or so... at the time, the largest deficit on record. Freezing at THAT level would be bad enough, but PresBo more than TRIPLED that deficit in a single year. So if he's seriously proposing that we freeze spending at $1.6 trillion deficits... well, hadn't he projected deficits that high, anyway? So where is the big benefit?

Does he really expect people to BUY this malarky?

And look at what little he wants to freeze... just 17% of the Federal budget. The rest is free to grow as it sees fit. And grow it is expected to do.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575024772877067744.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

The freeze would affect $447 billion in spending, or 17% of the total federal budget, and would likely be overtaken by growth in the untouched areas of discretionary spending. It's designed to save $250 billion over the coming decade, compared with what would have been spent had this area been allowed to rise along with inflation.

Notice that discretionary spending is expected to rise more than this modest "spending freeze" can compensate for.

PresBo is the only person I know of who can plan for larger budgets while calling it a "spending freeze" and billing it as a spending cut. Of course, he's also the man who claims his policies single-handedly created 2 million jobs at a time when we've lost more than 6 million jobs in the last year. How can we cut spending and increase spending at the same time? I guess the same way we can create jobs and lose jobs at the same time.

Any serious attempt at reigning in spending will HAVE to involve entitlement programs, because they make up such a large portion of the Federal budget. This one not only exempts them from the freeze, but cavalierly acknowledges they're likely to grow.

In my opinion, this is nothing more than another attempt to distract us from his failing ObamaCare agenda and hopefully make himself look like a budget-friendly, fiscally-responsible President. Notice that he doesn't care enough to actually BE that kind of President, just so long as he can logically CLAIM that he is.

He's looking for a way out, a way to ram ObamaCare through and still salvage this year's election cycle. I submit that it can't be done, that we're not THAT stupid.

Only time will tell.