What happens when you put a Freedom Caucus maniac in charge of the spending priorities of the White House? The horror show of a budget that former Rep. Mick Mulvaney, now budget director, released Tuesday. This is the extreme expression of the new Republican party and its priorities—grift. Massive tax cuts and all the spending for cronies, pain for the people.
Of 13 major initiatives in the budget, nine are drastic spending cuts, mostly aimed at low-income Americans. The biggest of those, by far, is an $866 billion reduction over 10 years in health care spending, mostly from Medicaid. That would be achieved if the Senate approves the House bill to undo President Obama’s Affordable Care Act ... It would deprive an estimated 10 million low-income Americans, many of them nursing home residents, of Medicaid benefits; it would also defund Planned Parenthood, reducing or ending health services to 2.5 million people, mainly women.
The budget also calls for slashing food stamps ($192 billion over 10 years) and disability benefits ($72 billion over 10 years), including a big chunk from the Social Security disability insurance program. [...]
The cuts to Social Security disability benefits would be similarly cruel. The budget assumes the cutbacks would prod disabled people back to work. That assumption ignores how severely disabled most benefit recipients are. The cuts also ignore Mr. Trump’s pledge not to cut Social Security. Mr. Mulvaney walked back that pledge on Monday, saying the promise pertained only to retirement benefits.
But massive increases in defense spending? Yeah, that's in there. And pretty much everything else—everything—is drastically cut. Medical research, public health, food assistance, farm supports, science, art, education, entire federal departments, and more get the axe. This to make the claim that the budget will be balanced in 10 years, which sounds totally like Mulvaney again. A balanced budget was never one of Trump's big campaign promises. In fact, his big promises were protecting—"no cuts"—Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. So much for Trump's promises. They're buckling under Mulvaney's zealotry.
And, as with everything Republican these days, the math doesn't work, as the Wall Street Journal points out: "It assumes the tax cuts won’t lose any revenue, and it uses the $2.1 trillion from the stronger growth the tax plan generates to plug existing deficit holes."
That means it takes credit, twice, for a tax plan the president hasn’t detailed beyond a one-page outline. It doesn’t include the huge tax cuts he has promised to sign, which would leave a big hole in his budget. […]
For the Trump administration’s budget to pencil out, its tax plan will need not only to pay for itself, a questionable premise on its own, but also to generate additional revenue.
That revenue comes from pixie dust and unicorn poop, as usual. Or in the words of Jason Furman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, "phony accounting." He added, "While one can debate how much of a boost to growth you get from tax cuts, there is no coherent argument for double counting the purported benefit of tax cuts." News flash: they don't care if the numbers work. They've never cared. Look who they made speaker of the House! The phony wonk Paul Ryan whose budget numbers have never added up unless you squinted at them sideways through a lens of rose-colored tax cuts to the wealthy.
This budget is most definitely a statement of Republican values. The only thing it lacks is new funding for poor houses, where the sick, the disabled, the hungry, the elderly, and the poor can be shoved out of sight and out of society.