The Political Math guy is back, this time with a visualization of President Obama’s proposed spending freeze:

Again, I’m not opposed to the freeze.  But it should be understood as a baby-step concession to fiscal reality by an administration that has long been living in la-la land, rather than as a serious attempt to wrestle with the country’s budgetary trajectory.

Mindboggling.  As I discussed yesterday, many on the left are in an uproar about Mr. Obama’s idea for a spending freeze because it flies in the face of Keynesian articles of faith prescribing government spending to prop up aggregate demand as a policy response to economic recession.  They’re, in other words, captive to the broken window fallacy and believe, urgently, that the U.S. economy remains moribund because government hasn’t spend lavishly enough on economic stimulus.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, who’s critical of the freeze not on the economic merits, but because it exempts defense spending.  In other words, if there’s to be a freeze, she wants to freeze more, not less.

Two possibilities present themselves.  Either:

(1) Madame Speaker is ignorant of economics and has been going along with the administration’s policies for the last year out of political tribalism and because they tickled her ideological erogenous zones.  Freezing non-defense discretionary spending without also taking a whack at those warmongering bubbas at the Pentagon was, for her, simply a bridge too far, notwithstanding the views of her base; or,

(2) Madame Speaker has completely misunderstood her base’s complaints about the freeze idea as being unrequited peacenikkery rather than unrequited Keynesianism, and accordingly, as she attempts to pander, is tripping over her own shoelaces.

What is this woman thinking?  Is she thinking?  Help me out, here.

(Hat tip: Hot Air)

In an apparent effort to come to grips with the fiscal angst that helped to propel Scott Brown to victory in Massachusetts last week, the Obama administration is floating the idea of a net spending freeze on non-defense discretionary spending for the next three years.

This news has been greeted by large segments of the port side of the political spectrum with a predictable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Ezra Klein, for example, is sobbing into his sippy cup both that the president is tacitly conceding the argment on spending and that he didn’t use the gesture to extract any policy concessions from either the Blue Dogs or Republicans.  (How Ezra imagines that, after the Massachusetts debacle, Mr. Obama has any political leverage on spending issues is beyond me.)

Nor has the starboard side of the political spectrum been particularly impressed by the move.  House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) criticized the idea as like unto “announcing that you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” and John McCain is presumably savoring the irony of Mr. Obama embracing an idea that he ridiculed during the presidential campaign.

My own take on this is, shall we say, nuanced.  It’s true that non-defense discretionary spending is a comparatively small portion of the federal budget (about 17%), and that it does not include the portions of the budget (principally entitlement spending) that are at the center of the country’s fiscal problems.  It’s also true that a spending freeze simply arrests the growth of government; this isn’t a true spending cut.  Next year’s budget will only be about one half of one percent smaller than it would have been otherwise, and the freeze would thus do virtually nothing to put the country back on stable fiscal footing.  So it would be easy to take Mr. Boehner’s view of things.

Instead, though, I’m inclined to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.  While I can hardly expect the man to repudiate Keynesian idiocy and embrace Austrian economic theory, if the looming prospect of an electoral repudiation has resulted in him having a mini-come-to-Jesus moment on spending, that’s something to be celebrated and encouraged.  What is it that they tell addicts?  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and something that’s going to save a little taxpayer money and restrain the growth of government even a little bit is better than the big fat nothing that we’ve been getting for far too long from Democrats and Republicans alike.