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B.O. wants domestic spending cuts in next budget
The Obama administration, mindful of public anxiety over the government's mushrooming debt, is shifting emphasis from big-spending policies to deficit reduction. Domestic agencies have been told to brace for a spending freeze or cuts of up to 5 percent as part of a midterm election-year push to rein in record budget shortfalls.
Do tell. How much is an up to 5% cut in the domestic budget in actual, you know, dollars? How close does it bring the budget toward balance with projected federal income for the fiscal year?
Yet with the economy still in distress and unemployment pushing past 10 percent, prospects for making a dent in a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit seem slight. And since the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs would likely be shielded from such cuts, overtures toward trimming the deficit may hold more symbolic value than substance.

President Barack Obama is expected to make post-recession spending restraint a key theme of his State of the Union address in January and an important element of the budget he submits to Congress a few weeks later. He is under increasing pressure, including from moderate and conservative members of his own party, to show he is serious about tackling a deficit that has become both an economic and political liability.
Showing is what's important here, not actually being serious.
Not since billionaire Ross Perot made budget-balancing the centerpiece of his 1992 third-party presidential bid has so much public concern been voiced over the gulf between what the government spends and what it takes in.

White House budget director Peter Orszag on Friday told The Associated Press it is imperative to start curbing the flow of red ink. But he called it a balancing act and said acting too fast could undercut what appears to be a fledgling economic recovery.

Orszag has said the spending blueprint, for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, 2010, would put the nation "back on a fiscally sustainable path" and suggested it would include a mix of spending cuts and new revenue-producing measures.
Posted by: Fred 2009-11-14
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=283263