Obama Fiscal "Freeze" Is a Hoax

"President Obama sold the $862 billion in stimulus spending as 'targeted, timely and temporary.' Critics said that was highly unlikely, and now the 2011 Obama budget has proven them right.

To wit, the White House is proposing to convert spending sold as a one-time economic boost into a permanent feature of future government growth. As both the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have pointed out, supposedly temporary parts of the stimulus—expansions of the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit and Pell Grants for college students—have now found their way into the budget baseline.

True to the way Mr. Obama has honored his campaign pledge of transparency, this news was buried in a footnote on page 170 of the budget's Analytical Perspectives.

...

The Responsible Federal Budget folks estimate that this fiscal sleight-of-hand would cost about $266 billion over 10 years, which by itself almost cancels out the White House's spending freeze."

The President is not serious about even slowing the spending. He is driving us over the debt cliff. This budget is full of phoney gambits, like the fact that the freeze doesn't start till next year, that they freeze budgets at levels bloated by two years of unprecedented Obama discretionary spending growth, that they assume massive savings from some future pie in the sky health care plan. But this one alarmed me more than all the others - $266B that they tried to trick us into believing was part of the current budget baseline, when in fact it is just another $266B of additional Obama robo-spending. As the link notes, just this one trick cancels out any benefit of the President's puny stab at fiscal responsiblity.