Let’s just say that I wasn’t very happy when I heard yesterday that President Obama was caving into pressure from deficit hawks and planned to announce a federal spending freeze at a time when a more robust stimulus is needed to get Americans back to work.
According to news reports,
Administration officials announced on Monday that Mr. Obama, in his State of the Union speech, will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that. The initiative, meant to signal his seriousness about restraining the deficit, provoked outrage among liberals in the president’s party because defense spending was exempted, while Republicans have mocked the proposal as too little, too late.
The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.
Security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, would not be frozen; neither would the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The freeze, of course, exempts the very programs that are driving the deficit off a cliff — the kind of spending that has transformed our government from one that is nominally democratic to a militaristic empire.
Apparently, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) — one of the Senate’s leading progressive voices — isn’t very happy either. From Talking Points Memo:
Start with this: The people who have been most outspoken about debt are the people most responsible for it…. The people, as I said, who have been most outspoken against the budget deficit have been those that voted for the Iraq war, and charged it to our kid, those who voted for the giveaway to the drug and insurance industry in 2003 and charged it to our kids, and those who voted who tax cuts for the rich and charged it to our kids, and those who ignored infrastructure needs in this country for a decade and charged that to our kids. And they come and they’re screaming the loudest about the balanced budget. And that disturbs me.
Paul Krugman was even more blunt:
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.”
And that is what the president has wrought. It would be heartbreaking if it weren’t for the fact that Washington political culture is a cesspool of shifting justifications and calculations that too often have little to do with whether I can afford to put gas in my car or my students at the county college can afford even their meager tuition.
The problem is that just about everyone in Washington is myopic, unable to see beyond their narrow interest (i.e., re-election), and that includes the president. Politics no longer has anything to do with policy and we are all the poorer for it.
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