Obama’s “Freeze” is Reactionary

My first reaction is the feeling that I am hallucinating and it's a bad trip:

President Barack Obama will propose a three-year freeze in discretionary, "non-security" spending as part of a budget he will unveil one week from now, a senior administration official told the Huffington Post and other reporters Monday evening.

The president will unveil the proposal during his State of the Union address on Wednesday….(link)

Say what? True, the economy has been spared another Great Depression—something that was accomplished by spending during a significant recessionary downturn—but it is hardly whole. Recessionary forces are still at work and there is a double-digit unemployment rate. If anything, what the economy needs is a second stimulus--a real one this time and not the largely token stimulus that Obama proposed and passed when he first entered office, one that doesn't merely spare us the worst but brings us to prosperity.

My second reaction is that when Obama had the chance to stride like FDR, he has retreated into becoming just another Herbert Hoover. It turns out I am not alone in that assessment:

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".) (link)

My third reaction is that Obama must be panicked politically. He has taken the wrong lessons from the Massachusetts Senatorial special election. Instead of becoming truly populist, he has become reactionary. His budget freeze proposal isn't merely a move to the center--where he doesn't need to move in any case--but to the right. Besides, this move will not endear Obama to the reactionary right in the USA. Obama's liability is that he has a "D" after his name. The relatively tiny but vociferous reactionary right faction (and I include the tea partiers especially in this group) in the USA is a largely Republican phenomenon. That won't like anything Obama does because he is a Democrat. End of story.

My final reaction is one of concern. How exactly is the economy supposed to get jump started again? If the government doesn't do it, no one else will:

The bigger news is Obama is planning a three-year budget freeze on a big chunk of discretionary spending. Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever.

A pending [sic] freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won't do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule. (link)

If the "last spender around" isn't spending, then the best the economy can hope for is stagnation. How is that going to help?

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