"The press is against me." LOL. He's experiencing it (harsh press) for the very first time. Ba. Ha. Ha.
Did everyone else find yesterday's announcement that Obama would initiate a "spending freeze" as funny fucking pathetic as I did? The NYT finds something to spin it in a positive manner:
The freeze that Mr. Obama will propose for the fiscal years 2011 through 2013 actually means a cut in real terms, since the affected spending would not keep pace with inflation.
See? It's practically a spending CUT!
Remember when the libs kept going on and on about Bush's $1 trillion deficit?
Let's put the President's spending freeze into persepective:
Last year’s shortfall [deficit] was $1.4 trillion. This year’s is projected to be $1.35 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected that cumulative deficits over the next ten years will reach $9.3 trillion, and the amount of federal debt held by the public will reach 82 percent of GDP. Economist John Taylor has noted that without deep spending cuts, taxes would have to go up by 60 percent in order to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio back down to a “manageable” 41 percent, which is where things stood when Obama took office.
More:
1.The Congressional Budget Office had already projected a decline in non-defense discretionary spending over the next few years (from $682 billion in FY 2010 gradually down to $640 billion in 2014)--which can be found on Table 3-1 of the CBO report. Which the group says actually makes the spending freeze "a hike in projected spending over the next several years."
2.The so-called "spending restraint" is only "a drop in the bucket." The White House claims the freeze will reduce total spending over the next decade by $250 billion. The CBO says that under current services, the federal government will be spending $42.9 trillion. Even with the freeze, Obama and the Democrats in Congress get to spend, ATR points out, 99.42 percent of what they were planning to.
3.Non-defense discretionary spending during Obama's first year in office grew by 17.4 percent. Freezing spending at that level over the next three years would still produce an average annual increase of 5.5 percent, which is faster than both the economy and wages are expected to grow.
Prepare for "But Bush ..." in 3 ...2 ... 1 ...
The Hammer on the Freeze:
It's not a hatchet. It's not a scalpel. It's a Q-tip. It's a fraud. This is a miniscule amount. It excludes Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs. It excludes all the entitlements, which are 60 percent of the budget. It excludes stimuli past and future — the two thirds of the near trillion-dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded.
It excludes the $1 trillion that would end up being spent on health care if it were passed.
What it is, is a $15 billion reduction in a year, 2011, in which the CBO has just announced we are going to have a deficit of $1.35 trillion, which means it is — it's a rounding error, it's lunch money. . . .
This isn't a real cut. It's an appearance of cuts. It's a maneuver as a response to what happened in Massachusetts because he lost the independents – Obama – 3-1, and he knows independents worry about debt and deficits and spending. . . .
So he announces a freeze which is meaningless. Remember, these departments enjoyed a 20 percent increase in budget as a result of what Obama and the Democrats had done in 2009. So you are freezing [discretionary spending] at an extraordinarily high and unusual [level].
The Hammer is why I tune in to Fox every night at 6:40 eastern.
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