This
week the Trump administration put out a budget blueprint — or more
accurately, a “budget” blueprint. After all, real budgets detail where
the money comes from and where it goes; this proclamation covers only
around a third of federal spending, while saying nothing about revenues
or projected deficits.
As
the fiscal expert Stan Collender put it: “This is not a budget. It’s a
Trump campaign press release masquerading as a government document.”
So
what’s the point of the document? The administration presumably hopes
that it will distract the public and the press from the ongoing debacle
over health care. But it probably won’t. And in any case, this
pseudo-budget embodies the same combination of meanspiritedness and
fiscal fantasy that has turned the Republican effort to replace
Obamacare into a train wreck.
Think for a minute about the vision of government and its role that the right has been peddling for decades.
In
this vision, much if not most government spending is a complete waste,
doing nobody any good. The same is true of government regulations. And
to the extent to which spending does help anyone, it’s Those People —
lazy, undeserving types who just so happen to be a bit, well, darker
than Real Americans.
This
was the kind of thinking — or, perhaps, “thinking” — that underlay
President Trump’s promise to replace Obamacare with something “far less expensive and far better.”
After all, it’s a government program, so he assumed that it must be
full of waste that a tough leader like him could eliminate.
Strange
to say, however, Republicans turn out to have no ideas about how to
make the program cheaper other than eliminating health insurance for 24
million people (and making coverage worse, with higher out-of-pocket
spending, for those who remain).
And
basically the same story applies at a broader level. Consider federal
spending as a whole: Outside defense it’s dominated by Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid — all programs that are crucial to tens of
millions of Americans, many of them the white working-class voters who
are the core of Trump support. Furthermore, most other government
spending also serves purposes that are popular, important or (usually)
both.
Given this reality, why are so many people opposed to “big government”?
Many have a distorted view of the numbers. For example, people have a vastly exaggerated view of how much we spend on foreign aid. Many also fail to connect their personal experience with public policy: Large numbers of Social Security and Medicare recipients believe that they make no use of any government social program.
Thanks
to these misperceptions, carefully nurtured by right-wing media,
politicians can often get away with running on promises of drastic
spending cuts: Many, perhaps most voters don’t see how such cuts would
affect their lives.
But
what will happen if anti-big-government politicians find themselves in a
position to put their agenda into practice? Voters will quickly get a
lesson in what slashing spending really means — and they won’t be happy.
That’s
basically the wall Obamacare repeal has just smashed into. And the same
thing will happen if this Trump whatever-it-is turns into an actual
budget.
Mr.
Trump himself gives every indication of having no idea what the federal
government does; his vaguely budget-like document isn’t much more than a
roughly scribbled list of numbers, with no clear picture of what those
numbers would mean. (In fairness, one could have said the same about
Paul Ryan’s budgets in the past. In fact, I did.)
But
the reality is that the proposed cuts would have ugly, highly visible
effects. Zeroing out the Community Development Block Grant program may
sound good if you have no idea what it does (which Mr. Trump surely
doesn’t); eliminating Meals on Wheels,
an immediate consequence, not so much. Nor would coal country, which
voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, like the consequences if he
eliminates the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Wait,
there’s more. Effectively disemboweling the Environmental Protection
Agency may sound smart if you imagine that it’s just a bunch of meddling
bureaucrats. But the public wants stronger, not weaker, environmental protection, and would not be pleased to see a sharp deterioration in air and water quality.
The
point is that Mr. Trump’s attempt to change the subject away from his
party’s health care quagmire isn’t going to work, and not just because
this supposed budget literally isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. At
a more fundamental level, it doesn’t even change the subject.
Republicans’
budget promises, like their health care promises, have been based on an
essentially fraudulent picture of what’s really going on. And now the
bill for these lies is coming due.
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