I've noticed a lack of reactions to the spending freeze proposal

[FrenchieCat]

and I'm a bit surprised.....
although I would suspect that many are waiting for
the economist to weight in, and that may be a wise approach,
because it is obvious that most of the folks here that
discuss economics don't necessarily know exactly what they are
talking about.

There are a few things to remember about what we know about this thus far;
it is a flexible spending freeze (unlike the McCain proposal, which was a freeze
across the board), so the larger number stays fixed, but within,
looking at the various programs, there are choices there to be made.

What I want to know is could this "Freeze" work similar to a line item veto,
in that there will now be more give and take on where spending is done in various programs?

Here's info on the Line item veto and what the point of it was.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/budget/stories/041096.htm

I can see this as being a way of making hard choices
as to what our priorities are.

In addition, I won't assume that defense spending not being included
has to means that it will automatically grow,
because that is not neccessarily the case,
although one could assume that based on our historical trends to date.

However, Iraq is winding down, it is very possible that the budget
for national defense could see some reduction or at least some leveling off,
even if not done via design, within a couple of years or so.
Of course, it could just keep going up; that I don't know.

I'm just trying to figure out why is spending more and more massive amounts of money
on everything supposed to be the progressive solution to our problem? Isn't part of the problem;
the fact that out of our budget, we continue to have to pay a larger amount of interest
by the day?

And how much more debt we are we supposed to accumulate before we actually start looking closely
on how the government spends the funds it has.

I'm not an economist, I am an accountant, and the two are not the same,
But when I do financial analysis, in an attempt to make recommendation in how to
better a client's bottomline, I always look at what and how funds are being spent,
and if there are possible ways of making the spending more efficient.

We never advise a client to just spend and spend and that
somehow this will result in a positive result.

Does being a progressive really mean that we only consider spending
as much as possible in any area possible except for defense, and nothing else will do?

Most say we are in a recession and spending is the only thing we can do....
but are we really talking about stopping spending, or are we just talking about
leaving it at the level that it is at already?

Considering that tax revenues will not increase based on the economic situation,
isn't true that we can't just continue in just doing what we have been doing?

Also, I think that opening up and looking at that entitlement program,
Medicare part D, is a good thing.


Just wondering if folks have any opinions on this. :shrug: