“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value,” Former Vice President Joe Biden has said.
This week, Trump unveiled his “budget blueprint”. It reveals so starkly Trump’s values (none) and priorities and fleshes out what his vision of “Make America Great Again” really means.
Trump’s budget increases defense spending by $54 billion (10 percent), and to bring the American nuclear arsenal to the tippy tippy top $1.4 billion) and lavishes spending on building a wall ($4 billion), expanding border patrol and expanding a deportation force to terrorize immigrant communities and separate families.
Mulvaney is very proud that these budget increases will be “paid for” by cuts everywhere else (though will still not make a dent in the national debt, an obsession with conservatives): slashing the budgets of the State Department by 28 percent (including most foreign aid except $3 billion for Israel) and Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent.
It would zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts and the United States Institute of Peace, as well as Meals on Wheels and Low Income Home Energy Assistance program.
It would slash funding for the Department of Education by $9 billion (13.5 percent) to pre-2002 levels despite 8.6 million more students, and cut $2.3 billion from professional development, teacher training and class size reduction program, eliminate a $1.2 billion after-school program, and slash grant aid for low-income students to attend higher education. But it advances school privatization by adding $1.4 billion for “school choice” (to be ramped up to $20 billion);
And it slashes funds for job retraining, so that those out-of-work coal miners have no choice but go back into the mines where they will have fewer environmental and work protections and no federal inspections.
Listen to Trump’s OMB Director Mike Mulvaney, who said he concocted the budget blueprint simply (and mindlessly, heartlessly) by taking Trump’s campaign speeches and putting numbers to them in order to devise a budget that would reflect “hard power, not soft power.”
“When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no,” Mulvaney said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
By this reasoning, I’m not a coal miner so why should I care if he has health care for Black Lung disease?
“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said, but “we’re not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.” Not deliver?
Justifying cutting spending for the school lunch program which was enacted to improve the education of low-income students, Mulvaney asserted, “There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually helping results, helping kids do better in school….”
They should name “Ignorance” the “Trump Defense”.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo blasted Trump’s “America First” budget as “dangerous, reckless, and contemptuous of American values. It should be rejected by Congress out of hand.
The proposal undermines policies and positions that have been cherished and defended by men and women of both parties, some for more than a century.
It leaves behind the most vulnerable among us, and puts our environment, our infrastructure, and our future at risk. The proposal takes a wrecking ball to the federal agencies that provide crucial support and relief to New Yorkers.”
Here’s the rub: except for the cuts to the State Department which has some Republicans howling, the rest of it are the things the Conservatives have been pushing for, but never had the guts to do because of the ramifications.
Now they have someone who is putting himself out there who doesn’t bother considering the impacts on ordinary people.
“This is our moment,” Vice President Mike Pence gleefully told the Club for Growth at the posh Breakers Hotel, Palm Beach.
This is as much Ryan’s budget as Trump’s, which likely will also enact massive tax cuts, paid for by slashing benefits to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, further exacerbating the inequality in wealth, political power and justice in this country that strains the limits to what this Democracy can sustain.
Trump’s ‘America First” budget isn’t just anti-American in the sense of contradicting fundamental American values (or who we like to believe we are). It is quite literally anti-Americans, in the sense of taking aim at the lives and livelihood and quality of life of hundreds of millions of individual Americans.
