Dead wrong, or deeply cynical

Either Obama is dooming the economy to placate deficit hawks, or he's pretending to freeze non-defense spending
By Joan Walsh
Salon.com

(Updated with Paul Krugman's latest, below)

Shhhhh!

Don't tell Republicans about Monday night's Rachel Maddow Show, where progressive economist Jared Bernstein, who works for Vice President Joe Biden, reassured Maddow that the controversial "spending freeze" the Obama administration just leaked wouldn't apply to many important social programs, at all. (You can watch it below.)

Maddow made the same point Robert Reich and Andrew Leonard did on Salon: Imposing a spending freeze during economic hard times is felony stupid. It's Roosevelt in '37. Bernstein quickly reassured Maddow she'd gotten her facts wrong: The administration will cut some programs, Bernstein said, but they'll increase funding for others. The freeze wouldn't apply to health care programs, the already passed stimulus, and certainly not to the package of middle class assistance programs Obama and Biden released the same day, Bernstein insisted.

But wasn't just the Maddow show; apparently Obama advisors briefed the liberal blogosphere to reassure folks that this freeze won't hurt at all. As Marc Ambinder explains:

"The freeze is irrelevant to health care because Medicare, Medicaid and taxes are all mandatory. So too are many of the programs for the neediest, such as unemployment insurance and Pell Grants. And many of the other programs were plussed up recently so the White House is freezing them at a very high level. A second stimulus package wouldn't be included either."

(More here.)