My friend and UCLA law school colleague Jonathan Zasloff opines on President Obama's soon-to-be-announced budget freeze:
If this is true – and right now it is unconfirmed – then there seems little reason to support Obama on anything:
President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up Wednesday’s State of the Union address, Hill Democratic sources familiar with the plan tell POLITICO.
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.
The freeze would not apply to defense spending or spending on intelligence, homeland security or veterans.
I’m trying to think of what could possibly be a worse plan. Let’s see: we might be entering a double-dip recession and unemployment is in double-digits, and you are going to freeze spending? What in God’s name are they thinking?
Perhaps the worst thing about this is how it cedes the ideological ground to the Republicans. At some point someone must make an argument for government. I think it was former Senator Paul Simon Harry S Truman who said: “give the voters a choice between a Republican and a Republican and they will choose a Republican every time.”
What next? The rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary? Or do we already have that?
UPDATE: Seemingly confirmed by the New York Times. Why exactly did I give money and make calls for this guy in 2008?
Plus, of course, there's the small point that even if the plan does save $250 billion, that's only three percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over the same time period.
Anyway, I know it's unbecoming of me to revel in a little schadenfreude, especially at the expense of a friend, but I can't help taking a certain amount of amusement from watching my leftie friends' heads exploding these last couple of weeks. It makes up a little for all the ribbing I took when Obama won.
