John McCain
loves the idea of President Obama's spending freeze. But there's a catch: McCain doesn't think the freeze goes far enough. He also wants President Obama to veto every single bill with "pork-barrel" spending in it.
Paul Krugman, meanwhile, is stunned by the apparent daftness of the idea.
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.
If Jared Bernstein's explanation of the "freeze" is accurate, then it's really not much of a freeze, and it's more of a political gimmick. So it's probably not Hooverism, but it certainly is a signal that the Obama Administration has no appetite for undertaking bold policy initiatives. Conservative Republicans might like that, but as we saw with John McCain, they won't like it enough to support President Obama. Perhaps they'll have better luck with independents who are concerned about the deficit, but it's hard to imagine a political gimmick winning them over -- and it's easy to imagine it backfiring, and making those voters even more cynical.
For more reaction from economists, see Turkana's recommended diary, Beyond Hysteria: What Economists and Analysts Are Writing.