Written by Joe Tetreault | 25 January 2010

Nate Silver calls it brain freeze. It's not. It's tone deaf. And it's only going to make matters worse.

What is it? Politico reports it as such:

President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up Wednesday's State of the Union address, Hill Democratic sources familiar with the plan tell POLITICO.

The move, intended to blunt the populist backlash against Obama's $787 billion stimulus and an era of trillion-dollar deficits -- and to quell Democratic anxiety over last Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate election -- is projected to save $250 billion, the Democrats said.

The political problem with the massive deficits is not just that they exist, but that a disproportionate number of people feel that they exist to help someone besides them. To make matters worse, freezing spending at this level hardly controls spending which remains excessively more than the spendthrift ways of Obama's oft-blamed predecessor.  It's even further from the balanced budgets of President Clinton's second term.

While the goal is to ostensibly short circuit the attacks of the populists, what it does in effect is strengthen them. Where money follwed freely to well-connected financial institutions and pet projects of the President's allies in Congress, now with unemployment in double digits, with the economy still bleeding jobs, President Obama is suggesting, we're going to freeze government spending. Toughing it out is apparently for the little people, just like taxes and regulation. It's as if the President declared:

"Let me be clear. We've given all the money to Wall Street. You people on Main Street are screwed."

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers to my humble opinion shop. Thanks for the link Glenn!

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