At about the 44-minute mark in President Obama’s address to Congress came a proposal for a three-year freeze of government spending — but only for one-sixth of the budget, exempting the biggest, fastest-growing expenditures: entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And the president noted that “this freeze won’t take effect until next year . .. .”

It was there that the laughter began from the Republicans, continuing through “… when the economy is stronger.” But the prepared text shows that the president then ad-libbed, “That’s how budgeting works,” gesturing either condescendingly or accusatorially to the GOP side of the aisle — after which the Democrats started laughing.

As columnist Charles Krauthammer told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly this week, what the president “doesn’t tell you is that last year, in their first year in office, when they had a free ride in spending, they ratcheted up the spending for all of these departments astronomically — on average over the last half of fiscal ‘09 and all of fiscal ‘10 … of about 20%.”

Annual increases are usually 4% or less, especially during periods of reduced inflation. As Krauthammer pointed out, the Obama freeze is “locking in the higher spending that Obama slid in last year.”

O’Reilly called it a “three-card monty.” According to Krauthammer, the freeze is “the opposite of what it looks like. It’s locking in these huge increases that were instituted last year … to establish a new baseline.” He concluded that “the net effect of the freeze is a reduction of $15 billion — with a budget deficit of $1.35 trillion.”

After a Democratic state last week elected a feisty Republican to replace a liberal lion, the president isn’t getting the message that Americans want more jobs, not still more spending.

Much of his speech may have focused on bringing new jobs, but so many of his proposals are job killers — from a massively regulatory health “reform” that would wreck much of the health insurance industry, to creating “clean energy jobs” via a cap-and-trade law that the president insists on calling “a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.”

Renouncing American exceptionalism, as he did last year in Strasbourg, Germany, the president told Congress Wednesday night that it must “revamp” our economy using China as a model, and Germany and India. But China’s success has come from expanding internal economic freedoms — imitating America; Germany has cut taxes substantially; India is freeing its markets.

Is America really supposed to mimic what these nations have been moving away from?

Topping it all off was the president’s unprecedented Chicago-style intimidation of the Supreme Court, outrageously accusing it of backing “America’s most powerful interests” because of its defense of the First Amendment. Imagine Ronald Reagan bringing half the chamber to its feet to glare down at the sitting justices for their liberal activism. The establishment media would have called it crass and unpresidential.

This was a State of the Union designed to push back against a growing popular uprising. Chances are it will only fan the flames.