Donald Trump, whose populist message and promises to help American workers propelled him to the White House, issued a budget proposal on Tuesday that instead takes aim at the social safety net on which many of his supporters rely.
Rather than breaking with Washington precedent, Trump’s spending blueprint follows established conservative orthodoxy, cutting taxes on the wealthy, boosting defense spending and taking a hatchet to programs for the poor and disabled – potentially hurting many of the rural and low-income Americans who voted him into office.
The budget proposal underscores the wide gulf between campaigning and governing, even for a president who promised to rewrite the presidential rule book.
The president’s budget plan calls for more than $1 trillion in cuts to a wide range of social programs with millions of beneficiaries, from farm subsidies to federal student aid. That includes a $600 billion cut to Medicaid over 10 years, despite Trump’s repeated promises on the campaign trail not to cut the program. The budget also takes an ax to the federal food stamp program and Social Security Disability Insurance.
Trump also proposes some of the deepest cuts to agriculture subsidies since Ronald Reagan, squeezing out nearly $50 billion over 10 years.
Trump’s budget would drastically cut domestic programs controlled by Congress, slashing $1.7 trillion over 10 years. At the end of the decade, the U.S. would spend nearly twice as much on defense as on other domestic programs. Domestic discretionary spending would be capped at $429 billion per year, below 2004 levels, while military spending soars to $722 billion.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...38696?lo=ap_b1
Watch Republicans Run Away From Donald Trump’s Ruthless Budget
Republicans will gather round Trump when it comes to RussiaGate, but Republicans are running away from the ruthless stench of the Trump budget
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/05/...iticus+USA+%29
where are the trumpers defending the budget tbh?
Bannon/Miller budget is essentially the same as Ryan's budget, without Ryan's Magik asterisks
the LIE of 3% growth every year for 10 years?
"motivated ignorance"? motivated lies to obtain tax cuts for the oligarchy
Trump budget replicates disastrous Kansas approach. This won’t end well.
When Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first offered his plan to revive the Kansas economy, he famously called it a “real live experiment” in tax and spending policy.
All Kansans know Brownback’s experiment failed. Dramatically cutting business taxes while raising other taxes for consumers did virtually nothing to increase employment relative to other states.
It did leave state lawmakers struggling to cover massive budget deficits — work that continues even now and won’t end for another generation.
But tax cuts were only one half of the Brownback experiment. Aided by conservatives in the Legislature, Kansas eviscerated the state’s social safety net: privatizing Medicaid, imposing new restrictions on welfare benefits, insisting on a tough food stamp work requirement.
Humiliating the poor seemed to be a particular focus. For a time, the state told welfare recipients they could withdraw only $25 at a time from an automated teller machine, a decision that prompted anger and derision across the nation before it was repealed.
Did it work? No. The number of people living in poverty in Kansas actually went up, the Census Bureau says, from 11.4 percent in 2013 to 14.2 percent in 2015. During the same period, the poverty rate in Missouri was cut almost in half.
http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/ed...152242787.html
getting people to work and off food stamps is good idea. A lot on food stamps that can work especially since the liberals raised the min wage
no one likes cuts but when you have debt you have to have cuts. the former president caused more debt then all the other presidents combined. But when trump tries to get it going in the right direction people do not like it. They want their program to not be cut. It is a bold budget but this country needs it.
You realize that there are massive tax cuts as well right? And it is all supposed to work out because it will magically double the growth rate.
Trump's Budget Expands Global War on the Backs of the American Poor
Trump's dream for the US is a nightmare for the working class.
The budget proposes deep cuts to government support for the poor, including slashing over $800 billion from Medicaid, $192 billion from food assistance, $272 billion from welfare programs, $72 billion from disability benefits, and ending programs that provide financial support for poor college students.
While cutting government assistance for working class Americans, the budget notably beefs up annual military spending by 10%, to the tune of $639 billion.
The US defense budget is already roughly the size of the next eleven largest national military budgets combined.
Trump's budget aims to go bigger, laying the groundwork "for a larger, more capable, and more lethal joint force [and] warfighting readiness."
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4...e-american-poo
...Leave aside, then, the details of what Trump is proposing and focus instead on how he is proposing it: via economic projections that have little basis in reality.
Trump’s budget would preserve Social Security1 and Medicare, boost military spending, cut taxes and still somehow balance the budget within 10 years. How would he accomplish that feat? Not through spending cuts elsewhere in the budget; those cuts, though dramatic, don’t come close to making up the gap. Rather, Trump gets the budget to balance (at least on paper) by assuming that economic growth will accelerate dramatically to 3 percent per year by 2021; it was 1.6 percent last year. More economic growth means more tax revenue for the government: In rough figures, each 0.1 percentage point increase in the growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product brings an additional $300 billion in tax revenue over a decade. So by forecasting faster growth, the administration is able to project trillions of dollars of extra revenue. (The “balanced budget” claim also relies on some fuzzy math: It effectively claims credit for the economic boost delivered by Trump’s tax cuts without accounting for how much those cuts would cost.)...
"Trump’s Budget Is Built On A Fantasy" By Ben Casselman
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-on-a-fantasy/
The enormity of Trump’s scam is coming into view
The Congressional Budget Office will release its score of the GOP health-care bill today, and whatever the details, it will confirm once again that the Republican plan would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, leaving many millions uncovered.
the evidence is mounting that Trump’s economic blueprint — whatever considerable harm it would do to people who didn’t vote for Trump — is also likely to hurt untold numbers of people who did vote for him.
First, I’ve obtained some new polling data from the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows
large numbers of Trump voters and their families rely on Medicaid, and large numbers of them oppose cutting the program.
Click to enlarge:
Trump’s budget would transform the structure of Medicaid and cut spending on the program by hundreds of billions of dollars on top of the GOP health-care plan’s hundreds of billions in cuts to the Medicaid expansion over 10 years. This would chop down the program by nearly half.
in four key Rust Belt states that flipped from Barack Obama to Trump, large percentages of those who benefit from food stamps and Social Security Disability Insurance
— both of which would get slashed by Trump — are
non-college whites, a core Trump cons uency. Those states are Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Other data shows that large percentages of those who stand to lose health coverage under the GOP health plan in those states are also blue-collar whites. Many of them are likely on Medicaid, and this toll would undoubtedly be made worse by the Trump budget.
Trump took great pains to distinguish himself from Paul Ryan and limited-government Republicans by vowing no cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, staking out an ideologically heterodox posture that likely helped boost him among working-class white voters. Obviously, that’s no longer operative.
The White House has an explanation for Trump’s reversal on Medicaid.
Asked by John Harwood to explain the flip, budget director Mick Mulvaney claimed the promise was supplanted by Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
This is nonsense: As Brian Beutler explains, Mulvaney “layered a lie of his own on top of Trump’s,” because Trump’s budget cuts to Medicaid “go hundreds of billions of dollars beyond phasing out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-draw7&wpmm=1
The only divergence between Bannon/Miller/Mulvaney budget and Ryan's multiply-passed budget is where and how badly to screw the poor why enriching the oligarchy.
"getting people to work and off food stamps is good idea."
always count on ducks to fall for and repeat mindlessly Repug lies.
the majority of able-bodied people on public assistance ARE also known as the WORKING poor.
eg, WI (or MI) spends about $1M/year assisting the EMPLOYEES of Walmart.
I voted for Trump. Now he wants to cut the aid I need!
Krista Shockey voted for President Trump in November. Now she's one of the people who might get hurt under his plan to cut safety net programs for the poor and disabled.
Shockey is on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program to help low-income Americans who are disabled. The monthly payment is just over $700 a month.
"It's my only income," Shockey told CNNMoney in the fall, when we first met her at Diner 23 in Waverly, a small town in southern Ohio that's seen better days. "I couldn't live" without it.
She was stunned to hear the president wants to downsize SSI. She hadn't heard about it until CNNMoney called her.
When releasing Trump's budget Tuesday, the White House hailed it as a "taxpayer first" plan. Trump's goal is to get millions of people off welfare and into full-time jobs. For Shockey, that won't be easy.
"There's no way I could go back to work," Shockey said this week. "I've got a lot of problems. I'm crippled in my feet, knees, back, hands."
Trump has proposed dramatic decreases in funding for food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, student loans, welfare (known as TANF) and disability programs like SSI and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).
"Honestly, I haven't been following much (news). I've got so much going on with my family. My mother died," she said.
CNNMoney reached out to about a dozen Trump voters who either rely on government aid to live or who work closely with the poor. Most were surprised.
Related: Trump's first budget: Trillions in cuts
Krista Shockey at Diner 23 in Waverly, Ohio. She relies on Supplemental Security Income.
Surprise at Trump's proposed cuts
For instance, America's "poorest white town" -- Beattyville, Kentucky -- voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Any cuts to the safety net would be felt acutely by its residents: 57% of households in Beattyville receive food stamps and 58% get disability payments from the government.
"I am still happy with President Trump," says Barbara Puckett, who lives in Beattyville and has been on Social Security disability since the late 1990s because of sclerosis. But she says she would worry if the budget becomes law and she loses her benefit.
For now Trump's budget is just a proposal and Puckett's benefits are still the same.
William Owens is a pastor in Beattyville. He's the type of person who pitches in wherever he's needed. In addition to leading a church and youth center, he's also a volunteer fire chief and chairman of the local school board.
Owens, a Trump supporter, said the president just wants the states and local governments to have more control over how welfare money is spent.
Related: Trump's budget: Big gifts for the rich, big cuts for the poor
Some Trump voters embrace the cuts
What Owens is referring to is the thinking of Mick Mulvaney, Trump's budget director. A former state lawmaker in South Carolina, Mulvaney is a big believer that states are better at crafting safety net programs than the federal government.
"We would see this program come down from Washington with all of these instructions on how to use it, and say, goodness gracious, this won't work in South Carolina," Mulvaney said.
William Owens is a pastor in Beattyville, Kentucky.
Pastor Owens has made it his life's mission to lift people out of poverty. He runs the Kentucky Mountain Mission, which has a bowling alley and gym where a lot of teens hang out after school. He can see both sides of the debate on government aid.
He grew up in an extremely poor family as one of 14 kids. They got "about $300 a month" in Social Security because his father was disabled and couldn't work. He works with families today that truly need the aid, but he also sees some that get dependent on it.
"I think some of it should go away," he told CNNMoney in January when we visited him. "I believe in a hand up and not a hand out."
Related: A record 107 million Americans have car loans
Some people on food stamps do work
Any cuts to food stamps and Medicaid will hurt Tyra Johnson's family.
Tyra Johnson also lives in Beattyville. She's a 39-year-old mom who receives food stamps.
When CNNMoney reached Johnson Tuesday, she was at work. She's earns $8 an hour as a housekeeper at a hotel. She's "not earning enough yet" to get off food stamps.
Johnson isn't alone. Nearly a third of families on food stamps have a working member, according to an analysis of government data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They don't earn enough money to be able to afford to put food on the table and get out of severe poverty.
"As of right now, I don't know what I would do" if Trump cuts food stamps and Medicaid, she says. Her two children also receive government-funded
Trump Wants Families On Food Stamps To Get Jobs. The Majority Already Work
Mick Mulvaney, unveiled the administration's budget blueprint earlier this week, which calls for significant cuts to food stamps, he noted that
the aim of the budget was to get people working.
(The goal is screw poor the and enrich the oligarchy. All Lies, All The Time.
But the reality is, many people (44 percent) who rely on SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps is now known — have at least one person in the family working, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And when it comes to families on SNAP with kids, a majority — 55 percent — are bringing home wages, according to USDA. The problem is, those wages aren't enough to actually live on.
That jibes with what Feeding America, a network of U.S. food banks, found in 2014 when it issued Hunger in America, a comprehensive report on who uses food pantries and why.
It found that 54 percent of the families who turn to pantries to help put food on the table have at least one member working, and
that rate was much higher, 71 percent, for households with kids.
many of the working poor who rely on SNAP benefits to get enough to eat are actually employed in the food industry.
As we've reported, an analysis from University of California, Berkeley Labor Center found that
52 percent of fast-food workers are enrolled in, or have their families enrolled in, one or more public assistance programs such as SNAP, Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Overall, Trump's budget proposal would slash $191 billion from SNAP's budget over the next decade. But many of the states where residents rely most heavily on food stamps are also states where support for the president is strongest.
In fact, SNAP already requires able-bodied adults without children to find a job within three months and to work at least 20 hours a week within three months or lose their benefits.
All told, about 42 million people receive SNAP benefits.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/...ady-work?sc=tw
IF SANDERS CAME UP WITH THE BUDGET PLAN BOUTONS WOULD BE SUCKING HIS THINKING HOW WONDERFULLY IT WAS
and you would be ing about how it was socialist
I say fine, cut off the ing SSI disability payments. Uneducated low information voters that stuck the rest of the country with Trump can eat their sandwich they ordered.
"It's Crap": The Trump Administration's Budget Is a Highway to Privatization
Former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, is leading the White House's effort
"Private companies should fund, build, and run more of the basic infrastructure of American life."
That's how the Washington Post sums up a key tenet of the Trump administration's thinking on infrastructure, in an article Wednesday that outlines the
White House's push to privatize "some public assets such as airports, bridges, highway rest stops, and other facilities."
President Donald Trump's budget proposal, released Tuesday, calls for spending roughly $200 billion over 10 years to spur at least $800 billion in state, local, and private infrastructure investment.
"Trump advisers said that to entice state and local governments to sell some of their assets, the administration is considering paying them a bonus," the Post reported.
"One of the more controversial elements of Trump's outline was
reducing the tolling restriction on interstate highways to attract private investment.
Trump also supports allowing the private sector to construct, operate, and maintain interstate rest areas, according to the plan."
The Post continued:The infrastructure initiative is being shaped by White House officials and a task force representing 16 federal departments and agencies. In addition, there is a committee of outside advisers co-chaired by billionaire developer Richard LeFrak, a Trump friend.
LeFrak said the administration's effort, which is being led by Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, [Transportation Secretary Elaine] Chao, and others, is a sweeping attempt to rethink how infrastructure gets built.
LeFrak said
the issues are intensely personal for Trump, who spent his career in real estate and sees this as an area where he can make a lasting impact.
Decades from now, people will still be paying higher tolls for the sake of Wall Street profits on an asset that could have belonged to them all along."Countering the dogma that "private companies can always do it better and cheaper," studies have found that on average, private contractors charge more than twice as much as the government would have paid federal workers for the same job.
PPPs are an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and divert government spending away from other public services.
They conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies."
They also divert public money away from the neediest infrastructure projects, which may not deliver sizable returns, in favor of those big-ticket items that will deliver hefty profits to investors.https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...-privatization
The predatory, voracious oligarchy going after every last dollar they don't already have.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-25-2017 at 10:37 AM.
it's funny how people cry about like food stamps and assistance while we can spend 605 billion on defense when the next 10 countries combined don't spend that much, and most of them are our allies
yes and then trump threatens to pull out of nato because if it and people
That's key evidence how ed up America is by the predatory, capitalistic oligarchy, MIC division.it's funny how people cry about like food stamps and assistance while we can spend 605 billion on defense when the next 10 countries combined don't spend that much, and most of them are our allies
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-25-2017 at 11:04 AM.
"By the way, we did this in the mid-1990s. Work requirements for welfare. Bill Clinton, who I believe was a Democrat, signed that into law. It was one of the most historic social policy achievements in the last 50 years.
"[President Barack] Obama came in and gutted all those work requirements. We got over half the people off welfare into work. Isn't that what we want to do? So, why can't we do that again? . . . I believe in giving people who are down on the luck a handout for sure. A hand up but not a handout."
Moore said the budget proposal is Trump "laying out is a vision."
Remember when Trump said he wasn't going to gut Medicaid because he wasn't a typical Republican?
Pretty much. They are pretty stupid breed though. They would still blame Obama and the Clinton's.
Agreed. I have no sympathy for idiots who bought the Trump University sales pitch. I still find it hard to fathom there are so many suckers in this country that can't recognize a con man. Then again televangelists are still banking big $$$ so I shouldn't be shocked
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