Domestic spending freeze...? Obama's jumped the shark...

when i first read the story about obama maybe, possibly, declaring a spending freeze, i thought it might be just a rumor... this morning's headlines made it official...

Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

i'm no fan of the ballooning deficit and i'm certainly no fan of an increasingly worthless fiat currency that's leaping off the printing presses so fast it's breathtaking... but, in the midst of a super-rich, elite-created economic storm in which businesses, states, and millions of citizens are suffering through furloughs, layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment and the complete wastage of the middle class, to put a freeze on domestic spending while still allowing free rein to our totally out-of-control defense and war spending is perhaps the most unconscionable thing done yet among the many disturbingly unconscionable things done by this president...

i'm glad to see krugman shares some of my utter dismay...

Obama Liquidates Himself

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.”

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.

this is one of the reasons i've slowed way down on blogging... my psyche is evidently too fragile at the moment to be able to regurgitate abominations of this magnitude...

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