President To Propose Budget Freeze And Earmark Ban

Posted by | January 25, 2011 11:31 | Filed under: Top Stories


ABC’s Jake Tapper is reporting that President Obama will call for a budget freeze and a ban on earmarks in his State of the Union Address.

The president will propose some new spending in certain areas that address the speech’s theme of “How We Win the Future”: innovation, education and infrastructure. But those increases will be proposed as part of an overall budget freeze, which given the annual rate of growth is often seen in Washington, DC, budgeting as a cut.

The FY 2011 budget was $3.8 trillion. Last year President Obama proposed a three-year hard freeze on non-security discretionary spending, to save $250 billion over the next decade; this would be much broader.

As for earmarks, President Obama has long been critical of the process in which members of Congress insert their pet projects into legislation without having them first go through the normal appropriations process, but Congress has continued to put billions of dollars of such projects in bills that arrive at the president’s desk.

Republicans have also called for bans on earmarks, even though they’ve used them; Can’t wait to see if proposing these GOP-supported ideas will cause Republicans to give Obama a standing ovation.

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Copyright 2011 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

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