I have--so far--seen nobody applaud Obama's "spending freeze."
From the right and the center:
- The Note: Obama Spending Freeze Lands on Hill with Thud...
- Nate Silver: FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The White House's Brain Freeze: My first reaction to tonight's news is that it's a mistake on par with John McCain's "suspending my campaign" gaffe...
- Pete Davis: Obama's Spending Freeze Is A Budgetary Fig Leaf: This evening, the White House leaked President Obama's proposed three year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending not including certain Homeland Security, Veterans' Affairs, and International Affairs programs. That spending would be capped for the next three years at its current level of $447 billion, saving $250 billion over the next 10 years. That sounds like at lot of money, but it's not much when compared to the roughly $6 trillion of non-defense discretionary spending in the current services baseline budget...
- Joe Klein: Deficit Gimmick: He's proposing a freeze of non-defense discretionary spending for the three years after this one....and it sounds a lot like a gimmick to me...
- Dan Mitchell: Obama’s Spending Freeze: Is It Real or Is He Copying Bush?: [D]on’t get too excited yet. It is not clear whether the White House is proposing a genuine spending freeze, meaning “budget outlays” for these programs stay at $447 billion for three years, or a make-believe freeze that applies only to “budget authority.” This is an enormously important distinction. Budget outlays matter because they represent the actual burden of government spending. Budget authority, by contrast, is a bookkeeping measure...
- Michelle Malkin:Fill in the blank: Obama proposing spending freeze is like…: The ballyhooed budget spending freeze that will be a feature of the State of the Union address tomorrow doesn’t cover behemoth entitlement programs. It doesn’t cover a second stimulus. It is limited to an electorally-timed three-year period. The White House is already promising that favored left-wing programs in education and the environment would get a pass. The “estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.” And President Obama was against such a spending freeze before he was for it...
- Orange Punch: Obama spending freeze hoax: President Obama’s budget freeze idea is nothing more than a gimmick. No doubt President Obama is a crafty politician and a persuasive speaker, but it is starting to become very clear that he believes his oratorical abilities are able to overcome just about anything, including common sense and the intellect of the American people...
- Alison Fraser: Is Obama’s Underwhelming Spending Freeze A Fakeroo?
- Merv: PrairiePundit: The Obama spending freeze in context: Rove does more than just anticipate the Obama move, he points out how misleading it is. Obama's credibility is already hanging by a thread with many voters and I don't think they will be fooled...
- Samuel Staley Obama's Gimmick: [S]pending freezes are populist gimmicks. They don't address the real nature of the problems and avoid taking responsibility for the hard decisions...
And from the left:
Paul Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself: A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback? It’s appalling on every level. It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.
Can somebody please point me to someone, somewhere who likes it?
