Krugman: Obama's spending freeze "appalling", "pure disaster"

[Irish_shark]

"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."

More: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/obama-liquidates-himself/?&pagewanted=print

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Obama's Been Following Hoover's Playbook From The Start

Unbelievable.

[SpiralHawk]

2. Hoobert Heever?

[Jennicut]

4. The myth that Herbert Hoover was a do nothing President has long been around.

Hoover started the govt. programs that were a precursor to FDR's while he was President and Secretary of Commerce under Harding and also raised taxes as President. He also did not want wage rates to be cut. He just didn't go as far or as fast as FDR did.

[realFedUp]

3. Freezing us out

Creating jobs should be the plan...more people working,
more taxes paid, debts that GWB left us get paid.

Go after those corporations hiding profits off shore and
aren't paying into the kitty.

If you are going to have a spending freeze, try it on
the defense budget first.

Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Voila. Money saved
right away.

You don't have long to get it right. You weren't
ready on day one, but you still have a chance.

[TheKentuckian]

5. If there is waste and redundancy it should be redirected rather than cut

People need jobs and we have a massive infrastructure hole that desperately needs to be filled as well as modernized. Private sector demand remains listless so every plausible dollar is needed to help offset this downturn.

I really just don't get what the President is trying to do. Hell, at this stage there is so little money in the system that even wasteful programs will end up a net job loss between the direct employment and the support industries if they are not redirected into programs with a better multiplier effect.

[Cosmocat]

6. and it is bad politics ... to boot ...

There is NO placating the "independents" who have been screaming about the budget since, oh, January of 2009, who previously had been republicans who were NO WHERE to be found the prior 8 years ...

This will mean NOTHING to them or the MSM ...

It does him no good, NONE ...

[high density]

7. It's just a shift of even more money towards defense

Money we don't spend on things like education and transportation will get swallowed up by the war machine instead.

[Odin2005]

8. Obama = Hoover.

I'm done with him.

[JVS]

9. Don't you know. Krugman is a healthcare expert, not an economist! This is just a smear

;-)

[Krashkopf]

11. Yeah . . . that Nobel Prize in Economics doesn't really mean anything . . .

They give those things to anyone who asks.

[Vidar]

10. K&R.

[Cha]

12. Oh boo hoo..anothere knee jerk reaction before

learning any of the facts involved.

[TheKentuckian]

13. So, I take it you believe there is enough money in the system?

and that all the resources needed for infrastructure, investment, R&D, and safetey net are fully in place?