On President Obama’s “spending freeze”:

It’s not a hatchet. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a Q-tip. It’s a fraud. This is a miniscule amount. It excludes Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs. It excludes all the entitlements, which are 60 percent of the budget. It excludes stimuli past and future — the two thirds of the near trillion-dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded.
It excludes the $1 trillion that would end up being spent on health care if it were passed.
What it is, is a $15 billion reduction in a year, 2011, in which the CBO has just announced we are going to have a deficit of $1.35 trillion, which means it is — it’s a rounding error, it’s lunch money. . . .
This isn’t a real cut. It’s an appearance of cuts. It’s a maneuver as a response to what happened in Massachusetts because he lost the independents – Obama – 3-1, and he knows independents worry about debt and deficits and spending. . . .
So he announces a freeze which is meaningless. Remember, these departments enjoyed a 20 percent increase in budget as a result of what Obama and the Democrats had done in 2009. So you are freezing [discretionary spending] at an extraordinarily high and unusual [level].