For a savings of less than 3% of the total federal Budget President Obama is throwing the needy under the bus when unemployment is 10%.
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.
But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
President Obama is going to cut federal spending programs that help the needy.
Defense budgets won't be affected. Foreign wars have been shown by economists such as Stieglitz to be the least effective use of federal funds for stimulation of the economy. So we get the worst of all worlds.
When there's an environmental and energy crisis brewing with rising temperatures and oil prices, science budgets and renewable energy budgets will stagnate.
And with massive unemployment the poor will be thrown under the bus.
Why?
A Misreading of the Massachusetts election results.
A lot of our caucus won’t like it but I don’t think we have any choice," said an adviser to Congressional Democratic leaders, who would only speak on condition of anonymity about internal party deliberations. "After Massachusetts and all the polls about independents’ abandoning us for being fiscally irresponsible, we can’t afford to be spending more than Obama.
This isn't leadership.
This is idiocy.
Yes, this is Hooverism.
UPDATE
To all those who say we don't have the details.
I went through discretionary budget freezes in Ronald Reagan's presidency and in the Clinton presidency. These freezes hurt our nuclear waste safety research budgets.
However, this time energy and education programs are slated for increases.
If you look at the pots of money you quickly see that programs that help the needy will have to be cut to make up for the increases in education and energy which are pretty large pots of money. Well defended programs like agriculture subsidies won't get cut because they have important political constituencies.