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A Trillion Here, a Trillion There, Pretty Soon You’re into Some Serious Scratch
This is a preview from this morning’s Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
Well, at long last, the Trump Administration has released its proposed budget. Almost immediately it was the subject of widespread hyperbolic hyperventilation. Why? Well, there are major cuts to lots of programs. (Here’s a chart to help visualize it.)
For example, the EPA gets a 31 percent cut, the State Department gets a 29 percent cut. Agriculture, Labor, and Justice are all in the 20s, HHS, Commerce, Education, Transportation, HUD, and Interior, are all in the teens. And these are offset with increases in Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Defense; the latter gets the largest increase at 10 percent. (Perhaps President Trump took literally Jim Mattis’s 2013 comment that “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.”)
As with all budgets, there’s some good stuff and some bad stuff. For example, this budget kills the Essential Air Service program. Indeed, there are 19 federal agencies that get cut completely, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for National and Community Service, Legal Services Corporation, Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the US Trade and Development Agency. You can find a full list of agencies and programs getting cut here. (And yet somehow this budget keeps the damn Import-Export Bank.)
Wow! That’s sounds like a lot! This budget is really gonna save us some money, huh? Nope. Those 19 agencies only amount to about $3 billion. Which, yeah, is a lot of money, but it’s only like six percent of the $54 billion increase in defense spending.
Here’s the thing: All this stuff you’re hearing about, all these cuts that people are going to freak out about, are discretionary spending. This budget doesn’t touch entitlement spending. In fact, President Trump has been very specific that he won’t touch that.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is a tiny part of the federal budget, Medicare and Social Security are the biggest part of the budget, and it only gets worse, because the Baby Boom generation is in the process of retiring.
The CBO is projecting 1.8 percent annual growth for the next decade. Any growth in federal revenue is going to be wiped out by growth in mandatory entitlement spending and interest on the national debt. So while it’s nice to see the Essential Air Service get zeroed out, it does nothing to deal with the real problem.
This is a preview from this morning’s Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
Published in General
President Trump isn’t spending money on climate change because it’s a waste of money
Pelosi: President Trump’s Budget is a Slap in the Face (bursts into laughter)
WINNING!
I don’t see “saving money” as the best reason to eliminate programs. If a couple federal programs actually get axed, that would seem to be an extremely positive precedent. Obviously, it’s going to be easiest to eliminate the smallest, least important programs first.
The government should be doing practically nothing. Even most of what it does that seems “essential” is because it outlaws anyone else from competing or is such a bottomless pit of money that competition is impossible.
All these programs are wrong, whether or not they cost that much in the grand scheme of things. “I’m going to make you fork over your money for all these programs you wouldn’t want to pay for, but don’t worry, many of them are only a tiny percentage of the overall money I take from you so you have no reason to concern yourself with that waste.”
If only even these meager savings could lead to a true reduction in spending rather than a reallocation to the favored programs of the Right.
From a purely economic perspective, the budget cuts are minimal. From a cultural perspective, they are enormous: we are advancing the idea that the sky won’t fall when the federal government cuts funding to programmes that give us the warm fuzzies. It also supports the cultural and civic idea that the government is there to protect the nation, not to fund the arts or perform charity that is best done at the local level.
Come on, comparing the savings from the programs targeted for outright elimination to the defense increase rather than the total reductions proposed is a rhetorical trick.
Would admitting that these $54 billion in proposed cuts are more substantial than any proposed by Reagan or either Bush just cause too much NT cognitive dissonance? Let alone touching upon the “dead on arrival” comments from the supposed fiscal conservatives in Congress.
And when did Medicaid stop being an entitlement? Isn’t the entire program being reconstructed and federalized under the AHCA?
Apart from defense and law enforcement the government does practically nothing. They just employ a lot of people and spend a lot of money doing it.
Getting the public and our leaders ready to face the impending fiscal crisis is going to take some work. These cuts are a start to thaat mind set. Medicaid , SS, and Medicare are the real chores (71% of Fed spending) and nobody has the stomach for it yet. In the mean time cut PBS and their swat team.