The annual budget proposal by the White House is sometimes described as aspirational, since Congress disposes. This time, it would be more accurate to say the Trump budget is closer to sci-fi or fantasy than to economic reality. The president’s fiction writers propose a $4.7 trillion budget thay will produce a deficit of over $1 trillion annually unless Congress agrees to cut spending by $2.7 trillion over ten years.
In this voyage to the land of make believe, funding for the State Department would drop by 32%, for Environmental Protection and Transportation by 22% each, for Interior by 23%, for Education and Health and Human Services by 12%. None of this is a surprise perhaps, since Trump ran on isolationism and a disbelief in threats posed by pollution to the climate. He seems to have no interest in funding medical or scientific research, education, or caring for the land.
But Trump did promise to never cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, possibly because of the demographics of his base. And yet, his budget sets out to blatantly and reckless break that promise. It would cut Medicare and Medicaid funding by $1.9 trillion, slashing health care spending for the poor, disabled and elderly. He’d cut another $327 billion from welfare programs for low income families and children, $207 billion in student loans, $200 billion in federal retirement payments.
Even if all these draconian cuts were enacted, the plan doesn’t forecast a balanced Federal budget until 2035 at the earliest. It is noteworthy that the only areas spared are Defense which would be granted a 5% increase in spending, and border security which would add $8.6 billion to funding for the wall on top of a notional $6.7 billion to be robbed from appropriations for other purposes if Trump’s imaginary national emergency is upheld by the courts.
It is bad enough that the budget reflects Trump’s animus for the poor and asylum-seeking immigrants, and betrays his promises to the working class, it also seeks to saddle states with the cost of the Social Welfare programs he wants to cut. It would guarantee that already poor states and their residents would suffer more hardship. It panders to the haves who got their billions in corporate and personal tax cuts while making the lives of the have-nots more precarious.
Worse is the budget’s reactionary priorities. It would defer for years action on essential adaptations to a changing reality that Trump is too blind to see. Climate change and the economic response it will necessitate are ignored. Our crumbling infrastructure that Trump promised to fix is nowhere to be seen, except for the single project he cares about — the wall, the wall, the wall.
This budget proposes no substantial funding to address the need for actual long-term immigration reform. It is silent on looming entitlement crisis that lawmakers have postponed addressing for a generation, even though a day of reckoning is fast approaching.
A new economy with tens of millions of jobs vanishing as robotics and AI evolve is a threat to social stability if workers’ needs for financial help and retraining are ignored, But nothing in this budget addresses this deeply disruptive, polarizing, and economically threatening change.
In short, the Trump budget, like most of his administration’s foreign and domestic policy is fan fiction with no relationship to the realities the country faces. It reneges on promises made to his base, continues to exacerbate a growing income inequality, favors the haves over the have-nots, and lies about it.
In stating so clearly whose side he is on and whose he is against, Trump has written the script for a smart opponent in 2020 to end his tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and send him packing to Trump Tower, Mar-A-Lago or possibly the cell next to Paul Manafort’s.
If his followers can break the hypnotic spell of his fraudulent patter and the fake news purveyed by Fox and Putin’s trolls who write his scripts, they too may join in an anti-Trump campaign sing-along:
“We are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong,
‘Cause if you really want to hear our views
”You haven’t done nothin'”