{"id":228547,"date":"2010-01-25T21:40:04","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T02:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=63575"},"modified":"2010-01-25T21:40:04","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T02:40:04","slug":"obama-announcing-three-year-discretionary-spending-freeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/228547","title":{"rendered":"Obama Announcing Three-Year Discretionary Spending Freeze"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Herbert<\/a><\/p>\n

Herbert Hoover, 31st President, by Douglas Chandor. Just sayin'. (photo: cliff1066)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Breaking tonight, the President will propose a discretionary, non-security spending freeze<\/a> for three years starting in FY 2011 as part of his State of the Union address.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

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.<\/p>\n

The freeze would not apply to defense spending or spending on intelligence, homeland security or veterans.<\/p>\n

The proposal is in line with a plan floated by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a fiscal hawk, who told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt last week that there was a \u201cfighting chance\u201d Obama would propose a freeze in most discretionary spending by the federal government as part of his address.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have to head out the door here in a moment, so more on this tomorrow. But Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.<\/p>\n

And of course, the truly unbelievable thing about this is how it’s framed as non-security discretionary spending, as if spending on the military is magic and somehow doesn’t affect budgets. If anything is bankrupting the country, it’s the bloated military budget<\/a>, which is currently at a higher level than during the Cold War buildup of the Reagan Administration<\/em>. So this freeze will do exceedingly little for the budget deficit, but is sure to hurt a lot of poor and middle-class people.<\/p>\n

Matt Yglesias was on a conference call<\/a> about this, where the line was that some programs would go up while others would go down, baselining the final number. Theoretically, this could mean a slash of farm subsidies by half while increasing community health centers or TANF payments. You can read him for additional context. I like this line:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

I\u2019m attempting not to freak out because (a) I don\u2019t have details and (b) I suspect this initiative was deliberately leaked to progressive bloggers in an effort to get denounced by the left and I don\u2019t want to give them the satisfaction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Share <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Herbert Hoover, 31st President, by Douglas Chandor. Just sayin'. (photo: cliff1066) Breaking tonight, the President will propose a discretionary, non-security spending freeze for three years starting in FY 2011 as part of his State of the Union address. The move, intended to blunt the populist backlash against Obama’s $787 billion stimulus and an era of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}