Obama Budget Has Few Takers

Congratulations, President Obama, on “seizing the center”: Both conservatives and liberals heaped criticism on the president’s proposed $3.73 trillion 2012 budget. Republicans, unsurprisingly, called for deeper spending cuts in addition to Obama’s freeze on all discretionary spending and cuts to popular aid programs like Pell Grants and heating assistance for low-income families. (Although House Majority Leader Eric Cantor did say he wanted to take talk of a government shut down “off the table.”) But liberals were upset about those cuts too. Paul Krugman writes you’d “think that the job of rescuing the economy was done, with unemployment still at 9 percent,” adding that Obama, buying into his opponents’ arguments, “has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy.”