Ms. Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense on the President’s reported proposed three-year budget freeze that excludes defense, veterans, homeland security, international and entitlement spending:

Excluding defense, veterans, homeland security, international and entitlement spending from the proposed spending freeze leaves President Obama fighting the deficit with both arms tied behind his back. While we are supportive of efforts to address the problems with our looming deficit, even in this time of recession, this freeze leaves five-sixths of total spending completely thawed. Cuts in the unlucky few areas of the budget will likely be overtaken by spending increases everywhere else.

The good news is that the President’s three year budget freeze will be done in a “smart” fashion. All programs are not created equal; in fact some are pretty wasteful. So rather than a straight across-the-board freeze, which penalizes the critical and the cruddy the same, the administration is proposing that some programs see increases while others see decreases, all under one cap. The cloud that surrounds that small silver lining is that Congress ultimately holds the cards in this game: they can choose (as they have in the past) to take the increases and ignore the cuts, leaving us in a worse budgetary shape than if we did nothing.

We have been here before. In fact, in the FY2009 budget President Bush proposed a freeze. Congress refused to go along, increasing spending on a litany of programs they felt had been underfunded during the Bush presidency. The result was a stalemate where only defense, homeland security and veterans funding went through. The rest of the budget – virtually all that would be subjected to the recently proposed freeze – was passed in an omnibus bill right after President Obama took office.

The President is also proposing several new tax cuts that would benefit the middle class. These will have an impact on the revenue side of the ledger and counter balance cuts from the spending freeze. And even outside the budget, all spending is not frozen. Congress has been considering another stimulus bill, dubbed the jobs bill. This will likely be in the neighborhood of $100 billion of off-budget spending.

While it is easy to view the proposed spending freeze cynically, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have to take many small measures in addition to bold strokes to get our budgetary house in order. While we prefer a more bold stroke that looks for cuts budget-wide, we take this as a small step that at least starts us moving in the right direction.

Major press coverage:

Obama to propose freeze on government spending (Washington Post)

Budget Freeze Is Proposed (Wall Street Journal)

Obama to Seek Spending Freeze to Trim Deficits (New York Times)