By Bruce Lachney
A few weeks ago, President Trump unveiled his budget. His budget writer, Mick Mulvaney, presented a proposal to make immediate and deep cuts in discretionary spending – namely, the environment, research, education, diplomacy, and the poor.
There are two significant problems with the budget. The first is the math, the second is meanness.
I hate bad math. If you are going to propose something, at least make an attempt to have the numbers add up.
In the case of the Trump administration, it is the dysfunction between the budget writer (Mick Mulvaney) and the administration's Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin. Mr. Mulvaney assumes that an economic growth rate of 3 percent will balance the budget. This is wildly optimistic, given the demographics of an aging population. Most creditable economists suggests 1 5 to 2 percent.
Mulvaney's 3 percent would produce about $2 trillion over the next decade. The problem is Mnuchin has already earmarked the 3 percet growth (or the $2 trillion) to pay for tax cuts to spark the economic growth in the first place. Mulvaney is using it to reduce the budget; Mnuchin is using it to pay for more tax cuts. See the problem?
Put another way (and this is true), the budget writer Mulvaney books an increase in revenue from estate taxes, but Mnuchin wants to eliminate the tax itself. Sorry, boys, you can't have it both ways.
The real crime is the pure meanness of the budget. The discretionary (non-defense) spending would shrink by 40 percent. Federal funding for Medicaid (health funding for the poor) would be slashed by almost 50 percent. It is worth noting that children account for 40 percent of Medicaid enrollees.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (food stamps) would be cut by a quarter. Even state Republican legislators should realize that need does not disappear, it merely is pushed down to the states. The callousness of the proposal is punctuated by the desire to redesign a tax code that would benefit the wealthy and large (not small) business, thus taking from the mouths of the poor children and giving it the rich.
How did we get here?
Bloomberg News recently reported the Nestle CEO, Ulf Mark Schneider, was quoted as saying that many companies are focused so much on cost-cutting that they undermine their growth prospects; “Many companies are focusing on radical cost-cutting to deliver higher profits in the short-term. This approach is not sustainable.” This is unfortunately the approach government has taken also.
Infecting the public today, proselytized by the right, is a theocracy of cost-cutting – an almost spiritual belief that any dollar sent to government will be wasted, that each cent is misappropriated, and that government is merely here to exploit. The truth is that voters have been seduced into believing that they can have roads, rails, airports, schools, parks, prisons, clean water, medical research, defense and more at no cost. More correctly, that someone else will pay the bill.
There is veracity to the fact that we all have to pay; that we must stop trying to pass the buck, pity our own poverty and be seduced into believing that you can have everything for nothing. It is time to do the math and exorcise the meanness.
Bruce Lachney is an Eatonville-area resident and farmer and a member of the Clover Park Technical College Board of Trustees.
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