The Great Betrayal: Donald Trump’s Budget
By
Robert Borosage
Donald
Trump’s FY 2018 budget is, the White House admits, a “message document” –
at best, a marker to begin negotiations. So what is the message this
White House is sending?
First,
it raises a long, fat middle finger pointed at the working class voters who
helped to put Trump in office. For them, this budget isn’t a con job; it is a
stunning betrayal.
Second,
it constitutes a wet kiss for House Speaker Paul Ryan and right-wing Republican
efforts to reward the rich and punish the poor.
It
even recycles the transparent lies that are standard Ryan fare – that top-end
tax cuts will pay for themselves, that a budget that slashes taxes, raises
money on the military, protects Social Security and Medicare will magically end
up balanced in 10 years, that giving the rich more money will produce jobs and
the poor will benefit from reversing efforts to assist them.
Senator
John Cornyn, the second ranking Republican in the Senate has called the budget,
“dead on arrival.” Its savage cuts even earned a rebuke from the House leader
of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, who objected to
eliminating “Meals on Wheels.”
Trump
released his budget while he was on the other side of the world, suggesting he
wanted to distance himself from its betrayal of his working class supporters,
were he capable of shame.
The elements were already exposed in his “skinny budget,” this document just provides more detail, but the detail itself is shocking. Medicaid is savaged, cut nearly in half by the end of the 10 years.
Millions
of lower income workers and their families will be deprived of health care.
Their kids will go to public schools without preschool, with fewer resources
and fewer after school programs.
They will find college less affordable and
training less available.
Their families will suffer from fouled water and air.
Those struggling with the opioid epidemic will get less treatment.
Women will
find health care services less available.
Workers
at Wal-Mart, fast food and other lower wage employers will be stripped of
the food stamps and tax credits that help them make ends meet.
The $1.7
trillion in domestic spending cuts will eliminate rural development programs,
and ravage farm subsidies.
Cuts in workplace safety and enforcement against
wage theft will leave more workers injured on the job and more gouged by
crooked employers.
Trump
turns his promise of a $1 trillion, 10-year bipartisan jobs program into a
joke. In the first year, his budget cuts more investment in infrastructure than
the $5 billion it adds.
The total spending over 10 years averages a paltry $20
billion a year; the rest goes to bribes “incentives” for private investors.
That insures that working families will get it in the ear – beginning
with Trump’s call for charging tolls on existing free interstate highways.
Eisenhower would be turning in his grave.
Senator
Bernie Sanders, the senior non-Republican on the Senate Budget Committee,
railed at the betrayal, wondering out loud to reporters how Republicans would
justify this budget to their supporters:
“Yeah,
I just voted for incredibly large tax breaks for billionaires. Oh, by the way,
we’re going to cut Head Start and child care and after-school programs and
health care and education!”
With
the betrayal comes the full package of Republican lies and hypocrisies. White
House talking points say the budget replaces “dependency with the dignity of
work.”
“We looked at this budget through the eyes of the people who are
actually paying the bills,” said Trump’s noxious OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.
But
a budget that cuts education and training, science and technology, burlesques
infrastructure investment, and savages programs that make work pay – from food
stamps to the Earned Income Tax Credit to child tax subsidies – will leave
workers with more dependence and less dignity.
Based
on this budget, billionaires are far more rapacious than even Bernie
Sanders suggests. It will give them millions in tax breaks at the cost of
throwing millions off of health care, cutting education and college assistance,
home heating, Meals on Wheels, aid to the disabled, support for schools and
college.
The
budget parrots Ryan’s fantasies about reaching a balanced budget. But the lies
about balanced budgets are far less important than the reality of how this
budget plans to use the money.
The
Trump-Republican Congress priorities will supercharge current trends. The
military will be our only industrial program. Leadership in renewable energy
and energy efficiency – the growth global markets of the next years –will be
squandered. Our edge in science and technology abandoned.
Our
infrastructure will grow ever more dangerous and decrepit, even as profiteers
lay on pervasive “user fees.”
America will grow more unequal; its working
people with less opportunity and declining longevity.
Trump’s
extreme cuts won’t pass, but don’t dismiss this budget.
In essence, Trump not
only shafts his supporters, he gives the Republican right-wing Congress,
led by House Speaker Paul Ryan, an open door to do extreme damage.
Republicans can
now parade as moderates compared to Trump, even as they savage America’s
prospects, succor the rich, and add to the burdens on workers and the poor.
Democrats will seek to the limit the damage. But this budget, in the hands of
this Congress, ensure that damage will be done.
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Programs on the chopping block
In
addition to broad cuts to most parts of the government other than the military,
specific programs that would be eliminated under the Trump budget include:
Agriculture Department
— $855 million
- McGovern-Dole International Food for Education
- Rural Business-Cooperative Service
- Rural Water and Waste Disposal Program Account
- Single Family Housing Direct Loans
Commerce Department —
$633 million
- Economic Development Administration
- Manufacturing Extension Partnership
- Minority Business Development Agency
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Grants and Education
Education Department —
$4.976 billion
- 21st Century Community Learning Centers
- Comprehensive Literacy Development Grants
- Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants
- Impact Aid Payments for Federal Property
- International Education
- Strengthening Institutions
- Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants
- Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants
- Teacher Quality Partnership
Energy Department —
$398 million
- Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy
- Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program and Title 17 Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program
- Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility
Health and Human
Services — $4.834 billion
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
- Community Services Block Grant (includes the funding for Meals on Wheels and other vital programs)
- Health Professions and Nursing Training Programs
- Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program
Homeland Security —
$235 million
- Flood Hazard Mapping and Risk Analysis Program
- Transportation Security Administration Law Enforcement Grants
Housing and Urban
Development — $4.123 billion
- Choice Neighborhoods
- Community Development Block
- HOME Investment Partnerships Program
- Self-Help and Assisted Homeownership Opportunity Program Account
Interior Department —
$122 million
- Abandoned Mine Land Grants
- Heritage Partnership Program
- National Wildlife Refuge Fund
Justice Department —
$210 million
- State Criminal Alien Assistance Program
Labor Department —
$527 million
- Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Training
- OSHA Training Grants
- Senior Community Service Employment Program
State Department and
USAID — $4.256 billion
- Development Assistance
- Earmarked Appropriations for Non-Profit Organizations
- The Asia Foundation
- East-West Center
- P.L. 480 Title II Food Aid
State Department,
USAID, and Treasury Department — $1.59 billion
- Green Climate Fund and Global Climate Change Initiative
Transportation
Department — $499 million
- National Infrastructure Investments (TIGER)
Treasury Department —
$43 million
- Global Agriculture and Food Security Program
Environmental
Protection Agency — $493 million
- Energy Star and Voluntary Climate Programs
- Geographic Programs
National Aeronautics
and Space Administration — $269 million
- Five Earth Science Missions
- Office of Education
Other Independent
Agencies — $2.683 billion
- Chemical Safety Board
- Corporation for National and Community Service
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
- International Development Foundations
- African Development Foundation
- Inter-American Foundation
- Legal Services Corporation
- National Endowment for the Arts
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
- Overseas Private Investment Corporation
- Regional Commissions
- U.S. Institute of Peace
- U.S. Trade and Development Agency
- Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars