Former Vice President Joe Biden said “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value,” and the National Republican Congressional Committee actually thought that was worth repeating as an attack on the Obama-Biden budget back in 2013.
Well.
Donald Trump’s budget tells us plenty about what he values—but it tells us even more about what he doesn’t value.
Trump values military hardware. He values a border wall. He doesn’t value people’s lives—feeding people or keeping them warm, doing medical research to prevent and heal diseases, job training or college preparation for disadvantaged youth. He doesn’t value the environment, or parks, or the arts. Trump’s America, the America he is trying to build with this budget, is ignorant, unskilled, sick, hungry, cruel, and violent. It’s bleak and barren and devoid of joy.
Here are some of the details.
There’s an assault on science and the things we do with science:
There’s an assault on people’s ability to get ahead in this economy:
There’s an assault on the basics of survival for the most vulnerable in our society:
- Meals on Wheels is on the chopping block. Meals on effing Wheels. Why? Because it’s not “showing any results,” as if people who are not hungry is not a result worth talking about. Same with meals for school kids.
- Heating assistance for low-income families would be eliminated, because it’s a “lower-impact program” that is “unable to demonstrate strong performance outcomes.” Because, again, apparently people who are not cold doesn’t count as a strong performance outcome.
There’s an assault on culture:
Priorities, priorities:
- We may not have Meals on Wheels, but the money for that border wall has to come from somewhere now that Trump has admitted Mexico won’t be paying for it.
- Trump's golfing schedule is much more important than the hundreds of thousands of meals for seniors that could be paid for with the money it takes to get him to Mar-a-Lago practically every weekend, and Melania’s decision to stay in New York will eat up the National Endowment for the Arts’ entire budget in just five months.
- This budget would kill people, but at least those are people being killed by someone other than Muslim extremists, so I guess that’s a win in Trump’s book?
As Nancy Pelosi said, “This budget is really a slap in the face of the future.”