The lack of merit to the idea of a three-year spending freeze has already been well picked over. Suffice it to say, as Robert Reich points out, it's a huge jobs killer. It excludes significant sources of debt, like defense spending. It indicates that the White House has all but abandoned making the case for health care reform as a means of reducing long-term structural deficits.
And since powerful lobbies still exist and continue to exert influence on policy, the programs that find themselves in the crosshairs will inevitably be those without powerful, moneyed influence groups behind them. So it won't be wasteful farm subsidies that are eliminated -- it will be programs that benefit middle and lower class Americans.
So much for that alliance between the White House and ACORN, I guess!
Beyond the bad economics, however, there's a more fundamental betrayal of principles, which I think Ryan Avent explains very eloquently in his blog for The Economist:
If it weren't enough that the proposal treats voters as children and a serious problem as a political football to be kicked around, the president's plan also appears to endanger an economy that hasn't meaningfully raised employment in over a decade and it solidifies defence spending as the untouchable budget category, when in fact it should be anything but. ...
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