TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Peter Suderman on Jack Lew, the man President Obama has nominated for Treasury Secretary:

“Make no mistake,” he wrote, “this will not be easy.” In order to illustrate how hard it would be, Lew singled out cuts the administration had made to community service block grants, a separate community development fund, and the oh-so-critical Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The total value of those cuts? Just $775 million. These are only some of the $20 billion in annual cuts Lew says the administration has proposed, but his point is to highlight the grave difficulty of even minor cutbacks. It’s a view that seems to see any reduction in federal spending, no matter how small, as an act of savagery.

At a time of record deficits, unsustainable debt, and sky-high federal spending, this is who the president has chosen for a position that The Washington Post describes as the administration’s “leading spokesperson for the economy,” as well as its senior advocate in the budget negotiation process: Someone who is determined to avoid cuts to the entitlements that are the chief drivers of the long-term debt and deeply resistant to cutting even the tiniest bit of spending in the short term. It’s a decision that says plenty about the administration’s intentions on budget policy.

It’s almost like the president doesn’t think we have a spending problem.

Oh, yeah.