This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 27, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama wants to freeze federal spending, at least a small portion of

federal spending, and just for three years.

As Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, says it's almost a

drop in the bucket.

The headline is President Obama proposes spending freeze

and if all you saw was the the headline you might be very impressed by

uh... the president's attempt to

uh... if not shrink spending at least freeze it

so what is the relevance of of his attempt to freeze spending?

Well there's two important points here. One is that the portion of the budget that

President Obama wants to freeze is only 13% of overall spending. He doesn't want to freeze defense,

he doesn't want to free Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and all the other entitlements. He doesn't want to freeze veterans and he

doesn't want to freeze Homeland Security. But he wants to freeze all the rest, but that's

only 13% of the overall budget. The other important thing here is that with President's

budget, it's only the first year that matters. So a President can say he's going to freeze

the budget for three years or five years or ten years but

frankly when next year's budget comes around it'll be a whole new ball game

so to say he's going to freeze over three years is kind of meaningless.

One interesting thing about

President Obama's budget freeze proposal is that he would freeze a portion of the budget that's

447 billion dollars. And that's okay. That's a good start but that portion of the budget has

...