Trump’s budget praised, panned by state lawmakers

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., praised Mulvaney for presenting a plan that tries to balance the budget within 10 years – then criticized the same proposal for cutting the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As any young adult knows who has tried to create their own personal budget, a budget is proposed earnings and expenses and requires multiple drafts and amendments.

Mulvaney’s appearance was one of four slated on Wednesday as Trump Cabinet officials fanned out on Capitol Hill to defend Trump’s budget, which contains jarring, politically unrealistic cuts to the social safety net and a broad swath of domestic programs.

Despite all the proposed cuts in this “America First” document – $3.6 trillion over a 10-year timeframe – the budget deficit, as a percentage of the overall USA economy, the GDP, could actually grow to a level larger than it is now.

So it has come to this: a Russian government-funded propaganda outfit schooling the Trump administration on the cruelty of its proposed federal budget.

President Donald Trump’s proposal to slash food stamps by a third will be a hard sell in Congress, even as Republicans have tried repeatedly to scale back the program’s $70 billion annual cost. Ron Wyden of OR, ranking Democrat on the committee that oversees health care financing.

Trump’s budget fulfills his campaign pledge to leave Medicare and Social Security benefits alone and boosts spending for the military and veterans.

See the problem? Trump is not only counting on supply-side magic growth to make his numbers work, he’s using the same magic bean twice. The government could spend more on R&D itself and set up innovation prizes to try to get the private sector to do the same, but there’s no guarantee that these would generate the kind of breakthroughs we had in the 1990s to speed up the economy.

The budget, officially titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness“, would offer states the choice to cap Medicaid funding through a per-capita spending allotment or a block grant for the entire program.

Atop Rogers’ list of worries is Trump’s proposed elimination of the $146 million Appalachian Regional Commission that has helped bring projects such as job training to unemployed coal miners, a broadband technology center to Kentucky and high-tech medical equipment to impoverished regions.

Health care, pensions, food stamps, education, housing, science, art, environmental regulations are being gutted to pay for a multitrillion-dollar tax cut for the rich and increased military spending.

But published reports put the scope of those cuts at $3.6 trillion over a decade, including $800 billion cuts to Medicaid funding in that span, a $1.92 billion cut from food stamps and a $38 billion reduction to farm subsidies, as well as cuts to student aid, science funding and more. There are optimistic economic forecasts. They are not supported by demographic factors and labor force productivity trends upon which economic growth ultimately depend. Furthermore, he testified that Obama’s first budget assumed 2.9% growth each year for 10 years. First the tax cuts provide enough extra growth to make the tax reform deficit-neutral.

Mr. Trump is projecting nearly a decade of 3 percent annual real growth, something the economy has not realized in the last 20 years. By making magical assumptions.

As was made clear throughout the hearing, Trump does not balance his budget exclusively upon economic growth. Yet, in the last Congress ARPA-E received additional funding through a bipartisan Senate amendment that passed by an 85-12 margin.

So, yes, Medicaid spending would increase by $4.7 trillion over a decade.

The top congressional Democrat thus held out the prospect of bipartisan collaboration with Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican reactionaries, whose main objection to the budget plan is Trump’s refusal to call openly for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.