Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump's Budget Demands Cruel Cuts, Gets Math Wrong

The Trump administration has put out its budget proposal, and Republicans in Congress have already said it is dead on arrival. That may be, but budgets reveal the true intent of a government. When money gets put where mouths are, values and priorities become clear. The Trump administration is intent on increasing the defense capacities of a sicker, poorer, more ignorant America. Not only that, it does so with poor arithmetic.

The Defense Department gets $639 billion, a 10% bump, to increase active personnel by 56,000, purchase helicopters, ships, and aircraft. The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nation's nuclear stockpile, would have an extra 11.4% to spend. The rest of the Energy Department faces cuts. And the wall the Mexicans are supposed to pay for will be funded by US taxpayers with a $1.6 billion down payment.

The New York Times notes, "Over the next decade, it calls for slashing more than $800 billion from Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, while slicing $192 billion from nutritional assistance and $272 billion over all from welfare programs. And domestic programs outside of military and homeland security whose budgets are determined annually by Congress would also take a hit, their funding falling by $57 billion, or 10.6 percent.

"The plan would cut by more than $72 billion the disability benefits upon which millions of Americans rely. It would eliminate loan programs that subsidize college education for the poor and those who take jobs in government or nonprofit organizations."

The reason, according to Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, is to better help people. "We're not going to measure our success by how much money we spend, but by how many people we actually help," he said. This journal agrees that is how things ought to be measured. Yet, surely one reduces spending on assistance after people receive help because the assistance is no longer needed, not before the help is provided. One also wonders if the same standard applies to the Pentagon; better defense is not always a function of more funding. The Maginot Line represented a lot of defense spending.

More troubling are the economic assumptions that underlie this nonsense. GDP is projected to grow at 3%, and that the extra growth will result in government revenues staying steady despite a lower tax rate. Every tax cut since President Reagan's first one failed to do this. Yet, to quote the Gipper, "There you go again."

The cherry on top, however, is the way the budget doesn't account for any of the costs. The prime example of this is the estate tax. The administration proposes abolishing it. That means no revenue will be realized from said estate tax. However, the budget document forecasts the collection of over $300 billion in estate taxes in the next decade. No wonder the White House believes it can balance the budget while doing all of this; no one there seems serious about arithmetic. For the record, zero is not equal to $300,000,000,000.

The Congress now will have to come up with its own plan, as Congress traditionally does. The president and his crew haven't provided the legislature with much to go on. A boost in military spending and a down payment on a wall that is of no value hardly constitutes a budget. It is already the end of May. Congress leaves town for the entire month of August. Repealing and replacing Obamacare is still on the schedule. This journal doesn't expect a budget of any kind this side of October 1, when the next federal fiscal year begins. When revenue bills do come to a vote, one expects more defense for an America that fails to live up to its potential.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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