Obama's Spending Freeze Is A Budgetary Fig Leaf.
This evening, the White House leaked President Obama's proposed three year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending not including certain Homeland Security, Veterans' Affairs, and International Affairs programs. That spending would be capped for the next three years at its current level of $447 billion, saving $250 billion over the next 10 years. That sounds like at lot of money, but it's not much when compared to the roughly $6 trillion of non-defense discretionary spending in the current services baseline budget. Most of that $250 billion will occur in the last five years of the next decade. With the decline of American Recovery and Reconstruction Act stimulus spending over the next few years, both OMB (Table S-3 on p.28) and CBO (Table 1-5 on p.20) show declining non-defense discretionary outlays from FY11 through FY13 already. Every little bit helps, but this is barely a budgetary fig leaf.
Eh, won't happen
It's an Obama idea, so it must be bad. He couldn't possibly be working on behalf of the people -- after all, he's un-American. Michele Bachmann said so. It must be true.
Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. Now that the Republicans have Senator ("the body") Brown they can do that at every turn.
Lord knows, a Democrat could never have a good idea to help the middle class, right?
My pre-existing condition kid can die for lack of affordable healthcare when COBRA runs out (her ongoing monitoring is too expensive, and she won't be able to afford it on her salary), just because the Congress critter's re-election and donations from the for-profit HC industry are more important than serving the needs of real Americans. But maybe that's the point -- they want people like my daughter to just leave the country (?)
Voters in Massachusetts seal the fate of a nation . . . they've got their Romneycare (how ironic that Brown voted for it), so why should they care about the rest of us?
Am I angry? Hell yes. This isn't the America I grew up with . . . the WWII generation didn't just dump good people in the trash heap . . . there was a real sense of community and working together back then. It appears the "me" generation is fine with putting 30 million lives at risk due to lack of basic, affordable health insurance.
Thanks Republicans . . . for nothing.
I say make them filibuster. Show the nation the true character of the Republican party . . . the party of no progress, no future.