Obama Freeze Forfeits America's Future

"Barack Obama's plan to unveil tonight a non-defense discretionary spending freeze for the next three years will essentially forfeit America's growth future to China.

"China has been massively investing in its high speed rail, its science labs, its educational system, its roads, its energy grid an its information super-duper highway. It has been obsessed with job retention and job creation. It has been building a mind-boggling number of every kind of power plant imaginable -- natural gas, high end coal, low end coal. It's investing in next gen renewable energy projects on a scale larger than the United States. It has been subsidizing all of this with a neo-mercantilist currency policy, pumping exports which it finances to consumers not only in the US but all over the world. China flaunts a robust "Buy China" requirement in its government and semi-private industrial procurements and contracting.

"And the President of the United States, one year into his job, and still dealing with the tail winds of the worst economic disaster in global markets and the US economy since the Great Depression, is saying that he is going to freeze spending on virtually everything but the wars we have on hand.

"America needs to invest in itself."

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Obama Liquidates Himself

"A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

"It’s appalling on every level.

"It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

"It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

"And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.” "

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