We begin today’s roundup with analysis of Donald Trump’s budget which makes drastic cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and more. First up, Dana Milbank:
Trump’s budget is a tremendous fraud — and it lays tremendous waste to his promises.
Remember when he said he would eliminate the federal debt, or at least halve it, during his presidency? His new budget proposes to add another $3.4 trillion by 2024 to the debt on top of the $3 trillion Trump has already added, by piling on $1-trillion-a-year budget deficits during a peacetime expansion. Under Trump’s latest plans, the debt would keep mushrooming until at least 2035 — by his administration’s own rosy projections.
Jeff Spross at Newsweek:
The first thing to grasp about Trump's budget proposal is how absolutely insaneits priorities are. The problem here is pretty straightforward: The Republican Party has long been obsessed with eliminating America's federal deficit — the shortfall between how much annual tax revenue it brings in and how much it spends. But Trump and his party want to protect military spending, and Trump himself has repeatedly promised to hold Social Security and Medicare harmless. Those three commitments rule out reductions to almost two-thirds of annual spending.
Throw in the fact that Republicans are hell-bent against raising taxes — Trump's budget would make permanent the massive tax cuts they passed in 2017 — and their only remaining option is to cut the remaining third of the budget: Medicaid, other welfare state programs like food stamps, plus basically everything the federal government does that isn't either military or social insurance for old people. And to meet Trump's goal of balancing the federal budget in 15 years, these cuts have to be massive.
Charles Pierce at Esquire:
[I]n a sane and functioning American republic, this budget would be more than political suicide. It would be the political equivalent of doing a Rasputin to yourself.
I mean, leaching funds from Medicare? Cutting the CDC in the middle of a pandemic? Cutting the EPA by a full quarter of its present budget? A ballooning deficit? There's something in there to enrage everyone from Bernie Sanders to Simpson and Bowles. However, on the morning that the president* dropped this dead fish on his own foot, people were lined up in the chill rain to attend his rally tonight, at which he will lie barefaced about everything in that budget. And they will eat up the lies in buckets because this is not a sane and functioning American republic any more. It is a huge terrarium containing every species of angry rube.
And on a final note,
Natalie Baptiste at Mother Jones calls it what it is — an attack on poor Americans:
The proposal calls for slashing SNAP funding by $182 billion over the next 10 years, a sharp reduction from the $58 billion the government spent on SNAP in 2019. Partly, those savings would come from significantly tightening eligibility requirements for SNAP. Currently, able-bodied SNAP recipients between the ages of 18 and 49 can receive food stamps for three months at a time and must prove that they are working at least 20 hours a week. The Trump budget calls for extending the work requirement rule to people up to the age of 65.
Initially, states with high unemployment rates were allowed to apply for waivers that would exempt recipients from the three-month limit. But beginning April 1, a new federal rule makes acquiring those waivers much more difficult. The rule is expected to remove 700,000 people from the food stamp rolls.