JAMES LILLIN
Staff Writer
Many, if not most, of my relatives are fiscal conservatives. Oftentimes, the label is tacked on to a sentence announcing their conservative lean in an apologetic or conciliatory way — like ‘I’m a conservative, but a fiscal conservative, so if you want to marry a man someday it’s okay with me.’
The label harkens back to an imaginary and idealized past where the GOP stood for low taxes, deficit-slashing and eliminating the national debt. When President Trump released his latest budget proposal last week, he made one thing abundantly clear: the “fiscal conservative” is dead.
Delving into the details, Trump does propose cutting trillions of dollars from the current budget, including a would-be historic 40 percent cut to non-defense discretionary spending. This spending includes, but is not limited to, funding for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Institute of Health, law enforcement and the State Department. These would have disastrous and wide-reaching consequences for our ability to combat crime, disease and climate change, but the effect might be difficult to see immediately.
What would be more immediately clear would be the great suffering wrought on the working poor, many of whom are a part of Trump’s base. Section 8 housing, which helps millions a year, would be cut by 20 percent. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as “food stamps,” already only work out to a meager $1.40 per person per meal. Trump’s budget cruelly proposes to cut that by a further 27.4 percent.
Many Trump voters were attracted to his promises on healthcare, as he repeatedly swore that he wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid and that he would improve the state of American healthcare. At one point, he even went as far as to promise universal coverage. The current proposal cuts Medicare by 7.1 percent and Medicaid by 22.5 percent.
This critical blow to working Americans is only exacerbated by a proposed $550 billion in new tax cuts slanted toward the rich. It’s clear that Trump is more concerned with “wealth care” than he is health care.
As for Trump’s massive promise in his State of The Union speech to provide at least $1.5 trillion in infrastructure spending, which would help all Americans and attract bipartisan support? He proposes only $199 billion in infrastructure funding, the efficacy of which would be hamstrung by being coupled by $178 billion in cuts to our current transportation spending.
The degree to which Trump is forsaking his campaign promises, in favor of flagellating the poor to support massive corporate gains, is reaching levels of absurdity that border satire. The same candidate who said, “I think it’s terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans,” is now releasing a budget that will restructure the student loan system to do away with current options and increase the already-massive student loan burden by a further $203 billion.
If it sounds like these cuts would, at the very least, help to balance the budget, you would be sorely mistaken. The new budget, between the deep tax cuts and huge spending boost to the military and border security, will actually, according to the New York Times, add $7 trillion to the deficit, further worsening our national debt crisis.
It’s only when examining the White House’s math behind their justification of their outrageous, deficit-boosting budget that the administration’s total incompetence and dishonesty can be truly understood. We would currently be lucky to break a 2 percent growth in GDP, but the White House assumes an almost comical growth of 3 percent a year, a number that we haven’t broken in over a decade.
This same administration, to justify its similarly disastrous 2017 budget, double-counted a $1.3 trillion increase in questionably-projected growth from its tax plan, hoping that the profits it saved the uber-rich would trickle down to the rest of America while magically multiplying itself. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called it “a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.”
Oftentimes initial budgets are more political in nature than they are practical, but the simple gall it takes an administration to publish such a poorly cobbled-together tapestry of cruelty and incompetence speaks volumes about the contempt it holds for the intelligence and well-being of the average American.
This budget may be adapted slightly by Congress, or its broad policies may never get close to being implemented, depending on the political climate in the coming months. As it currently stands, however, this newly-proposed budget is an echo of last year’s fraudulent attempt to pillage the dwindling assets of poor and working Americans, all in the name of Making America Great Again.
TAGS: Budget, Trump, State of the Union, Medicare, Politics, Obamacare, Taxes