Politico is reporting that “President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, ‘non-security’ spending in the lead-up to Wednesday’s State of the Union address” in an effort to moot criticism by Blue Dog Democrats and mounting voter concern over the deficit.
While the announcement is sure to make headlines, two observations are in order:
1) This isn’t news. In the budget proposal that President Obama submitted to Congress last year, his budget office already projected actual cuts and freezes in “non-defense” discretionary spending for the next three years. That’s in part because of the huge increase in that area of spending that the President requested (and received) for the current fiscal year. To be specific: FY2009 (President Bush’s last budget) had $589 billion in non-defense discretionary spending. That number jumped to $687 billion in FY2010 (Obama’s first budget), and then drops to $641 billion in FY2011, $622 billion in FY2012 and $625 billion in FY2013. So for the White House to now boast that it will freeze non-defense discretionary spending is hardly news. If anything, it’s backtracking on its earlier plans to actually cut that area of spending.
2) If Obama really wanted to reign in the deficit, he’d propose real cuts – and not just to discretionary spending. Congressional Democrats already opened the door to cutting Medicare during the health care debate – but only to fund a new entitlement program. A bold (and surprising) act by the President would be to propose those cuts to be used for actual deficit reduction. But he won’t do that, because he’s not that serious about cutting the deficit (see observation #1).
(To see Obama’s FY2010 budget projections, look at page 8 here.)
