That these two headlines appear on the Wall Street Journal's homepage on the same day has me scratching my head.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA or Recovery Act). We're going to put up some more substantive posts later, but I thought these graphs in the New York Times really get to the heart of the "did it work" question.

In our statement on the president's FY 2011 budget request to Congress, we mentioned a column in Tuesday's WaPo by Len Burman in which he called for a freeze in tax expenditures. The column, however, deserves more attention than just the one liner we added in the OMB Watch statement.

We here in the Budget Brigade have been trying to get our heads around President Obama's announcement that his FY 2011 budget will propose freezing non-security discretionary spending at 2010 levels. Here's what has us beating our heads against our desks.