President Trump is releasing a $4.7 trillion budget plan Monday that stands as a sharp challenge to Congress and the Democrats trying to unseat him, the first act in a multi-front struggle that could consume Washington for the next 18 months.
The budget proposal dramatically raises the possibility of another government shutdown in October, and Trump used to the budget to notify Congress he is seeking an additional $8.6 billion to build sections of a wall along the U. S.-Mexico border.
The budget also calls on increased military spending, another in a string of proposals that prompted Democrats to label the budget a non-starter that will not win congressional support. If lawmakers and Trump don’t reach a spending agreement by the end of September, many government operations will ground to a halt.
Trump’s “Budget for a Better America” also includes dozens of spending cuts and policy overhauls that frame the early stages of the debate for the 2020 election. For example, Trump for the first time calls for cutting $845 billion from Medicare, the popular health care program for the elderly that in the past he had largely said he would protect.
His budget would also propose a major overhaul of Medicaid, the health care program for low-income Americans run jointly with states, by turning more power over to states. This would save $241 billion over 10 years.
Other agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department, Transportation Department, and Interior Department, would see their budgets severely reduced.
The Party of Limited Government’s budget also locks in trillion dollar annual deficits for the foreseeable future.
Trump is a disaster for two independent reasons:
(1) He is grotesquely unfit for the office, because he’s an ignorant, lazy, incompetent, and profoundly corrupt idiot; and
(2) He’s perfectly content to play the role of a bog standard Republican on just about every public policy issue.
In other words, the idea he would buck the GOP money men and support some sort of herrenvolk welfare system, like an actual populist demagogue would, is every bit as much of a grift as everything else about him. He’s just a crooked plutocrat, who no more cares about protecting the white race from the dusky hordes than he does about any other crusade besides increasing the wealth and power of Donald Trump.
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