Obama's Freezing For A Reason

Make no mistake, President Obama is not now and will never be, a fiscal hawk. Announcing this phony freeze on a minuscule portion of discretionary spending during his SOTU is his feeble attempt to win back the support of independent voters. These are the folks that jumped off his bandwagon in Virginia and New Jersey last fall and overturned it in Massachusetts last Tuesday.

After these electoral defeats, the president's radical agenda is in deep trouble. So, he's going to pull out the same rhetoric that got him elected in the first place. President Obama and his advisers are forgetting one thing, the American people are not stupid. They may have bought his act during the campaign, that he was going to cut spending, reduce the deficit etc.. Fool me once(not this voter) shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. President Obama's first year in office has made a mockery of those promises. The last time I checked, freezing spending after you have already increased it by 25%, isn't the same thing as going line by line through the budget and cutting all the waste(he made that promise in 2 debates with McCain).

The president is trumpeting that this "freeze" will save $15 billion dollars next year. While that's not chump change, it's dwarfed by the $75 billion increase in the cost of the stimulus bill that refuses to stimulate. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released the new figure for the stimulus bill of $862 billion, up from $787 billion because of costs for unemployment for Americans who can't find work. That's right, President Obama's promised jobs engine and solution to the recession has proven to be an abject failure, but it like most every other government program, won't be subject to his "freeze".

Here's CBO's summary and Heritage's true analysis of our country's fiscal health:

"Under current law, the federal fiscal outlook beyond this year is daunting ... accumulating deficits will push federal debt held by the public to significantly higher levels. At the end of 2009, debt held by the public was $7.5 trillion, or 54% of GDP; by the end of 2020, debt is projected to climb to $15 trillion, or 67% of GDP." But as bad as those numbers are, our fiscal health is actually worse. The CBO is forced by Congress to make a number of unrealistic assumptions about future revenue and spending changes. But their report makes up for this by including alternative projections that make more realistic assumptions. Heritage fellow Brian Riedl crunched those numbers and found:
The public debt -- $7.5 trillion at the end of 2009 -- is projected to triple to $22.1 trillion by 2020.
Over what would be President Obama's eight years in office if re-elected, baseline budget deficits are projected to total $9.7 trillion -- nearly triple the $3.3 trillion in deficits accumulated by President George W. Bush.
By 2020, the budget forecasts a $1.9 trillion annual budget deficit, a public debt of 98 percent of GDP and annual net interest spending surpassing $1 trillion."

Where is the government spending all this money?

"In 2009, federal spending reached 24.7 percent of GDP -- the highest level in American history outside of World War II. Non-defense spending reached an all-time record of 20.1 percent of GDP."

So, after Obama/Pelosi/Reid have gone on a spending binge the likes this country has never seen before, they'll accept a freeze on some spending. How very kind of them. For the record, here's what the "freeze" will actually apply to:

"Obama's spending "freeze" will only last three years, will not start until 2011, will only apply to a $447 billion slice of the federal government's $3.5 trillion budget, and will not apply to any of the unspent $862 billion stimulus plan, his health care plan or the House of Representatives' additional $156 billion stimulus plan."

If government were run like a family, it's the equivalent of borrowing money you can never repay to buy a Malibu dream house that's about to fall off a cliff and claiming you're being fiscally responsible because you bought the beach chairs at WalMart.