Comment on the Belmont Club: "Hatchet versus scalpel"

He never in any of these clips once mentioned anything, outside of defense, that his scalpel would actually cut. He used even this as an occasion to promise more funding for special interests. Barack Obama's "Hard Freeze" will become a dimly remembered punch line to be filed with the infamous Social Security "lockbox." Combine this idea with the Congress delegating it's budget functions to a special committee and you have a guarantee that hundreds of billions of dollars would be shifted into undisclosed off the books external accounts. Illinois politicians are small potatoes at this game. To meet the pros at off the books financing you have to go to New York.

There is a joke about each countries sense of economics based on what happens to two cows. In China a series of fancy shell game transactions turn the two cows into 20 fictional cows. That is what happened to the US housing market under Franks and Dodd and Raines and Gorelick. That is what NY State budgeting is like with quasi public entities selling things, like roads and prisons, to each other. That is what I predict if the Obama crowd get the budget out of public view.