By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
It makes no difference that the budget proposed by Trump and his administration, with $2 trillion in cuts to the social safety net is considered “dead on arrival” just as his other budgets were, equally determined to make life harder for working Americans to live securely and make the already obscenely rich even richer and more powerful. Because as we have already seen, Trump doesn’t actually care about Article 1 that gives Congress the “power of the purse” to determine what gets funded and what does not. Nor does he abide by the oath to “faithfully execute” the laws of the land as he sabotages the Affordable Care Act and Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
Trump has already shown he will simply declare a “national emergency” or a “national security” issue, shut down government and divert money allocated, say, for the military to build a border wall so shaky it falls down in a stiff wind, when Congress expressly said no.
A proposed budget is a statement of the values and priorities that an administration holds. Trump’s proposed budget - which like the current one would run record deficits of $1 trillion - proposes to pay for those deficits on the backs of the most vulnerable and powerless, literally diverting billions from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid; it continues to hollow away funding for environmental protection, public health, diplomacy (foreign aid is cut 21 percent). Non-defense spending is cut 5 percent.
What increases? Defense. Indeed, between funding for Trump’s new toy, the Space Force, and new nuclear weapons (funding up 20 percent), he is triggering a new arms race that (recall) caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The budget, which is also Trump’s campaign platform (“Elect me because I will continue to punish immigrants;” “Elect me because I will continue to exacerbate income inequality, climate change, and isolate the US from the global community”), will saddle the next president who comes into office in 2021 (lord willing).
So the first thing is that Congress should do is reduce funding for Defense (proposed increase of $3 billion to $741 billion) by the $8 billion that Trump has already commandeered for his Humpty Dumpty vanity wall – it shows that Defense didn’t need the money anyway and if Congress puts that amount or increases funding the way Trump wants, more will be allocated for the misadventure that is the border wall (quite literally a 15th century “solution” to a 21st century problem).
“President Trump calls his proposal, ‘A Budget for America’s Future.’ But the future he envisions is bleak indeed,” stated Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director of the Coalition on Human Needs. “He proposes less health care, less food for Americans in need, large cuts to Social Security disability benefits, and other harmful cuts, ranging from affordable housing to heating and cooling assistance to student loans and so much more. This is the Trump choice: make the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent, and take away medical care, housing, job training, and food from millions of Americans.
“Although Congress in recent years has rejected the President’s most harmful proposed cuts to human needs programs, danger remains,” Weinstein stressed.”Why? Because the Trump Administration has aggressively sought to carry out its proposed cuts through administrative rule-making and moving or refusing to spend money despite Congressional intent.
“A perfect example of this is Trump’s approach to Medicaid and SNAP. The Trump Budget proposes massive and mean-spirited changes to these programs. Millions would lose assistance if Congress went along. Congress has rejected such cuts in the past, so the Trump Administration presses on with executive actions contrary to Congressional intent and often contrary to law.
The Administration would deny SNAP to low-income workers and their children and to very poor individuals unable to keep a steady job. Similarly, if the Administration succeeds in its efforts to cut and cap Medicaid, millions more would lose health care coverage, even after we learned last fall that between 2017 and 2018, an additional 1.9 million Americans found themselves without access to health care – the first time this happened since enactment of the Affordable Care Act.”
Here is just a sample of the proposed cuts, according to the Coalition on Human Needs:
- Cuts SNAP/food stamps by $181 billion over 10 years.
- Slashes Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by more than $200 billion over 10 years by giving states incentives to cut benefits, charge very low-income people more for their care, or require people to document work in order to receive health care.
- Cuts Department of Education funding by 8 percent, including cuts to student loan [cut by $170 billion when outstanding crippling student loans amount to $1.5 trillion] and Work-Study programs and elimination of funding for after school programs.
- Cuts Department of Health and Human Services by 9 percent, including the elimination of all funding for the Community Services Block Grant and Social Services Block Grant programs, both of which help low-income communities and families overcome poverty.
- Cuts Department of Housing and Urban Development by 15.2 percent, including the elimination of all funding for the Community Development Block Grant program, elimination of the HOME program and de-funding the National Housing Trust Fund, making it more difficult for low-income Americans to find affordable housing.
- Cuts Environmental Protection Agency funding by 26.5 percent. This agency is in charge of ensuring clean air, clean water, chemical safety, and many public health protections.
“If we truly want a ‘Budget for America’s Future’,” as the President puts it, then we need a budget that ensures families have access to quality, affordable health care, enough food to feed their kids, affordable housing and decent-paying jobs with decent benefits. The President’s budget takes us in the opposite direction,” Weinstein asserted.
Trump also would put obstacles in front of the disabled (note Leviticus 19:14: "You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God - I am your Lord.") in order to receive benefits – requiring much more frequent reporting and paperwork.
“By the administration’s own projections, these changes will save $2.6 billion in benefit payments over the next decade. The changes will lead to 2.6 million additional reviews over this period, costing the government $1.8 billion,” noted Dean Baker on Truthout.org. The net savings amounts to $80 million a year, or less than 0.002 percent of projected federal spending. “It is not too much more than what taxpayers spend each year on Trump’s golfing vacations”.
So what is clear is that the cuts are simply cruel and ideological rather than “fiscally responsible.”
Indeed, it is proven that SNAP, which helps 40 million struggling to afford food, “has improved health and education outcomes and is considered one of the most effective anti-poverty programs,” Weinstein stated. The cuts amount to nearly 30 percent on top of what he is doing through rule changes, that in combination would cut SNAP by $50 billion and kick 3 to 4 million households off.
Instead of vouchers that people could use to buy foods (from an approved list), the Trump Big Idea uses a food box of “shelf stable” commodities (that is, non-fresh food) – essentially taking away the discretion or dignity of choosing their own food (another payoff to well-connected Big Ag?) The cuts specifically target working families, elderly and disabled.
How does the Trump administration defend cutting $2 trillion from the social safety net? “The budget proposes other commonsense mandatory savers, such as a universal work requirement for Medicaid, TANF housing, and food stamps. This will ensure that we are helping to lift able-bodied adults off of a cycle of dependency and onto a ladder of economic opportunity,” OMB Acting Director Russ Vought stated on a press call providing background on the proposed budget.
In yet another instance of using the budget to steamroll policy: “We have provisions that do not allow taxpayer resources to go to clinics that perform abortion. So that could include Planned Parenthood, but they're also moving themselves out of the discretionary grants now as a result of the regulations,” Vought said.
Meanwhile, Trump wants more tax cuts and incentives that have already resulted in $1 trillion budget deficits, most notably, during a period of prosperity, not a recession necessitating government spending, as when Obama took the reins and pulled America from the abyss of a Great Recession.
Trump would make the 2017 tax cuts permanent instead of expiring in 2025, costing $1.4 trillion over 10 years while boosting the income of the richest 1% by $40,000 more a year – that’s pocket change for billionaires, but diverts money that could be spent on health care or education, investments that promote economic growth.
“Not surprising – similar to past budgets, but no less appalling – this budget would dramatically increase poverty, create hardship for millions at same time it offers tax breaks to corporations and wealthiest, go a long way in growing income inequality, take healthcare away from millions, cuts aid to millions of families and families struggling to make ends meet,” said Tamara Fucile, Director for Government Affairs and Senior Adviser for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “At the same time, it slashes investment that would help produce economic growth.
Even the so-called “investments” are fraudulent. Trump is once again proposing to spend $1 trillion over a decade on infrastructure but as he has demonstrated with Ukraine, the Gateway Tunnel and California high-speed rail and disaster aid, this would amount to no more than a slush fund he would use to extort political favors, giving gorging new meaning to “bringing home the bacon.”
As for the oft-used assertion by Trump and right-wingers that spending on the social safety net is akin to “socialism” as activist Sergio Siano tweeted in disgust, “So you hate socialism, ya say? If you make $50K a year, $36 of your taxes goes to food stamps, $4,000 goes to corporate subsidies. If the $36 upsets you more than the $4,000, then you just hate poor people – not socialism.”
The self-declared Democratic Socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders who is running for president, stated, “The Trump Budget for 2021 is a budget of, by, and for the 1 percent. It reflects profoundly unethical priorities and shows that the president is—and it gives me no great pleasure to say this—a liar. Just last week, President Trump told the American people in his State of the Union that he would ‘always protect your Medicare’ and ‘always protect your SocialSecurity. Always.’”
Defending the $2 trillion in “mandatory savings and reform” measures to the press, OMB’s Vought said repeatedly, “this President believes in getting people who are in a cycle of dependency..off of welfare onto the ladder of economic opportunity.”
“This is a budget that funds priorities where the President supports spending money.. We are trying to fund what his priorities are, what his campaign commitments are....
“We're going to keep proposing these types of budgets and hope that, at some point, Congress will have some sense of fiscal sanity and join us in trying to tackle our debt and deficits.”
So even though Trump’s budget is “dead on arrival” it is his clarion call to what a second term would look like. Moreover, even if (lord willing) he is replaced in 2021, the budget saddles the next president with his dystopian policies. Fiscal sanity and morality demand rejection of Trump and his proposed budget.
See: The Human Needs Report Special Edition: President Trump's FY21 Budget Request
View the complete report here (HTML) or here (PDF).
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