In several conversations yesterday, White House officials told reporters that the president will announce a three-year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending (the freeze also exempts Veterans' Affairs and Homeland Security). Cue heads exploding on the left, which seems to be what the White House wants. President Obama ran against a spending freeze, telling John McCain during a 2008 debate at Ole Miss that "the problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel."
Administration officials argue, however, that this is a scalpel approach: Within the portion of the budget they are highlighting, which is about $475 billion in programs, they plan to have both cuts and increases that equal out to a top-line freeze. The cuts, about $10 billion to $15 billion in 2011 and $250 billion over 10 years, look to double the spending decreases the administration coaxed out of Congress this year. And since the cuts don't come until 2011, officials don't expect economic growth to suffer.
"I am confident that anyone who goes through this budget who cares about job creation and economic growth will see those priorities increased," one White House official says, noting Obama's commitments at yesterday's meeting of the Middle Class Task Force.
Given the low likelihood that all of these cuts get passed in Congress or that Republicans even sign on to this plan, and the fact that it really isn't a "freeze," the problem is less in policy and more in the incredibly pernicious political argument: Obama is accepting the conservative budget framing that progressives fought against during his campaign by focusing deficit reduction on the most underfunded chunk of the budget, exempting the Defense Department from responsibility, and leaving revenue off the table (it's no coincidence, however, that 2011 is when some of the Bush tax cuts will roll back). It's exactly what progressive budget experts said not to do.
Obama could have tried to educate the country about responsible deficit management. His health-care reforms, for instance, would have a greater long-term budget effect than this proposal. He could have continued his emphasis from last year on targeting specific wasteful programs, like agriculture subsidies. Instead, emphasizing the blanket nature of the freeze makes it likely that those programs with the least-powerful constituencies -- the poor and disadvantaged -- will face the brunt of these cuts. If Obama actually picks a fight with Congress over the content and size of the cuts, he may win some political points with independents in the short term, but in the long term he's buying into a conversation about spending that will make it harder to lower the deficit in the future, especially in a progressive manner.
Also, in the Annals of Guns or Butter, it's worth noting that 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan will cost $17 billion in 2011 [PDF], almost exactly what is being cut from the budget by this maneuver.
-- Tim Fernholz
