ECONOMY: Obama Spending Freeze 101 (charts, videos)

OBAMA WILL PROPOSE 3-YEAR FREEZE ON ‘NON-SECURITY’ FEDERAL SPENDING
After the big loss in the Massachusetts special elections, Democrats will now pretend to be conservatives.

	MINUSCULE BUDGET CUT After a year of spending binge, Obama will propose a freeze for 3 years BUT - Obama’s freeze will apply only to domestic programs and agencies. - This freeze is MINUSCULE portion of the overall budget. - Savings will be modest $10 to $15 Billion next year out of a $3.5 Trillion budget. The White House says it will save $250 Billions over 10 years BUT - The budget saving would be too small relative to the deficit: It would be less than 3% of the roughly $9 Trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time. The problem with Obama’s freeze: “Although the freeze would shave no more than $15 billion off next year’s budget — barely denting a deficit projected to exceed $1 trillion for the third year in a row…The spending freeze would affect only about one-eighth of the nation’s $3.5 trillion budget, the bulk of which is devoted to entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are responsible for much of the future increase in spending. It would not restrain funding for the $787 billion economic stimulus package Obama pushed through Congress early last year, nor would it apply to a new bill aimed at creating jobs, which Democrats have identified as their top priority in the run-up to November’s congressional elections.” Programs with the most spending will be exempted from the budget freeze: -Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -Foreign aid -cost of wars in Iraq & Afghanistan -Homeland security & veterans affairs 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 and: - Housing & Urban Development - Justice - Energy & Transportation - Agriculture - Health & Human Services
	Budget Freeze Won’t Fix the Debt Uncle Sam’s fake diet: “President Obama’s announced budget freeze will do little to address the national debt. The proposed plan only affects 1/8th of the overall budget, and fails to do anything about the escalating entitlement expenditures that are responsible for the majority of future borrowing. Over the next decade, the federal government is projected to add $9 trillion to its existing $12.4 trillion debt. If Obama’s budget freeze is successful, the government will only borrow $8.75 trillion.”
	How We Got Here? Too much government spending! WSJ: If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing.
	Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s budget cuts are a fraud, a rounding error, lunch money “It’s not a hatchet. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a Q-tip. It’s a fraud. This is a minuscule amount. Remember it excludes defense, homeland security, veteran’s affairs. It excludes all of the entitlements which are 60% of the budget. And, it excludes stimuli past and future, the nearly two-thirds of the trillion dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded. It excludes the trillion that would have been spent on health care if it would have been passed. What it is a $15 billion reduction in a year 2011 in which the CBO has just announced we’re going to have a deficit of $1.35 trillion. It’s a rounding error. It’s lunch money.”
	Flashback: Obama Ridiculed McCain’s Call for Spending Freeze

SPENDING IS DRIVING THE DEFICIT UPWARDS

BUDGET DEFICIT

SPENDING IS DRIVING THE DEFICIT UPWARDS (July 2009 Projections)

RELATED US debt clock US debt (Treasury Dept.) Budget: $13 Trillion in Debt over the Next Decade Federal Spending by the Numbers – 2009 (Summary) Projected Deficit, Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit in Pictures (March 2009) After Tripling Deficit in 2009 Obama on Track to Nearly Quadruple Bush Deficit in 2010 Obama’s Tripling of the National Debt in Pictures The Obama Budget: Spending, Taxes, and Doubling the National Debt (March 2009) Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics

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