President Obama will announce in Wednesday's State of the Union address his plan to attack the federal budget deficit by freezing all discretionary spending at current levels for three years. The departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Veteran Affairs, and some international programs will be exempt from these budgetary stipulations. While discretionary spending constitutes only 1/6 of the federal budget and while entitlement programs such as Medicare keep growing, discretionary spending still accounts for $474 billion per year - the level at which the spending will be frozen for the next three years. This effort is predicted to alienate Obama from some of the more liberal congressional Democrats, but on the whole analysts believe that this move will give Obama more credibility on economic policy and foster relations with the Republican side. Said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio: "Given Washington Democrats' unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you're going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest." After the State of the Union address, Obama must publicly release his budget plan for the fiscal year 2011 by February 1. I think that a bigger problem with the federal budget is entitlement programs, not discretionary spending. However, this is a step in the right direction and I don't know if we're ever going to be able to cut funding for programs like Medicare without facing dire consequences. This is a first part of a long process, and we'll see where it takes the country financially. Read more at http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/25/obama.spending.freeze/index.html?hpt=Sbin.
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