We begin today’s roundup with an analysis of the president’s budget and his priorities. First up, John Cassidy:
So how does the “Budget for a Better America” treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump’s campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money.
Adam Harris at The Atlantic:
At a granular level, the budget request looks similar to the ones released by the administration in 2017 and 2018. It would, again, eliminate a range of programs such as the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, an incentive program that forgives the student loans of public-service workers, and there would be steep cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which funds a lot of research in higher education. And it would cut funding for teacher development under Title II, the part of the law funding preparation and pathways to develop better teachers.
Senator Leahy sums up the reaction on the Hill:
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on Monday slammed President Trump's 2020 budget proposal, calling it "dead on arrival and divorced from reality."
Leahy added in a statement that the proposal "is not worth the paper it is printed on" and predicted it will be rejected by Congress. He called it based on a "gimmick" said it was "not a serious proposal."
At USA Today, Susan Milligan points out that the president’s budget does nothing to address the massive debt his tax cuts have added to the economy:
while candidate Trump pledged to get rid of the (then-$19 trillion) national debt in eight years, the debt – the cumulative amount of money the government owes, and which requires interest payments – hit a record $22 trillion earlier this month. The deficit – the amount the government is spending compared to tax receipts and other revenues – recently hit $310 billion, up from $176 billion a year ago.
Trump's budget claims to start whittling away at the debt and deficit, bringing the budget in balance by 2034. While deficits would continue at $1 trillion-plus for four years (including the current year) and the debt would also continue to grow, the White House blueprint predicts both would drop as a percentage of gross national product.
However, the budget numbers are rooted in what outside analysts call unrealistically rosy assumptions of how much the economy will grow.
Kevin Drum and the team at Mother Jones put together a handy graphic:
And you can bet this will be in ads in the Midwest region in 2020:
President Donald Trump's latest budget proposes a 5 percent reduction in non-defense spending, including a 90 percent cut for a popular Great Lakes cleanup programthat bipartisan Michigan lawmakers pledged to fight.
Funding for the $300 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative would be cut by $270 million to $30 million under the budget released Monday — the third year in a row the Trump budget team proposed cuts to the program.
On a final note, don’t miss Catherine Rampell’s analysis at The Washington Post:
Fair enough: President Trump’s heartless and whackadoodle budget, released on Monday, will never actually become law. Even when his party had unified control of government, he couldn’t get Capitol Hill to take major portions of his budget terribly seriously.
Still, a president’s budget plan is a statement of his priorities. And based on this latest statement, Trump’s priorities continue to be redistributing wealth ever upward, from poor to rich, and selling the public more fantasies and lies.