People will be dying in the streets. Grandma will be thrown over a cliff. Children will go to bed hungry, and the government, like some silent movie villain of yore, will twist its mustache and laugh. These are some of the hyperbolic statements being made by angry progressives following the announcement of President Donald J. Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget for Fiscal Year 2018, beginning October 1.
The hue and cry amongst progressives began even before the budget was announced. The dastardly Trump administration, aided and abetted by the evil Republicans in Congress, will cut the budget, eliminate programs and leave the working people of the nation in tatters, with soup lines and homeless camps to follow.
Of course, the progressives are themselves aided and abetted by a compliant and mimicking media that echoes their cries, and discusses the callousness of it all. All this reminds one of the Reagan administration, and the Bush ’43 administration. In those years, the progressives and the media saw no reason to cut anything and decried any attempt at curbing spending.
But let’s get one thing absolutely straight. A “cut” in Washington DC parlance is not a cut. Budget-making in the nation’s capital has, since the 1970s, been what is called “baseline budgeting.” That means that the amount of money given an agency or department in one fiscal year is the “baseline” of spending in the new fiscal year. What is actually called a “cut” is, in fact, a slowing of the percentage of growth. That is what the Trump budget is actually requesting. Departments will get increases, but not at the rate of growth expected. So, instead of a requested 7 percent increase, the department might get a 4 percent hike. Where is that a cut?
As a pundit said on a Fox News business program last week (we are paraphrasing). If one asks for a 40-cent raise, and gets a 30-cent raise, is that a cut? Normal, everyday people would agree it is not. But in the world of the federal government and the bubble that is Congress, this is looked on as a cut.
Admittedly, there are 66 programs chopped in the Trump budget. Much ink and many trees have been sacrificed to make this point. But what is missing from the ink-stained pages of many newspapers is the fact that all of those programs are redundant, ineffective or both. President Trump is keeping a campaign pledge by looking at programs and eliminating those that don’t work.
It was President Reagan who said the nearest thing to eternal life on Earth is a federal program. And the acolytes of big government, Democrats and the media, see any attempt to trimming programs as an assault on the poor, regardless of whether they work or not. Our own Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro Greenberg immediately sent out a press release decrying in a most shrill manner the cuts that were being proposed.
Included in this spending plan is a deficit of more than half a trillion dollars. That means taxes and fees will not cover the spending in this budget, and will have to be borrowed, adding another substantial amount to our $20 trillion national debt. We are borrowing against the future. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for this profligacy for generations to come.
Cutting programs and dismissing thousands from the federal government employ is a good first step in trying to end the madness that is Washington. The federal government is the nation’s top employer. It takes more than five months for the average worker to pay the taxes levied against him. Not only that, but to feed a bloated government estates are pilfered by Uncle Sam to the point many families have to sell the assets in order to pay the taxes. That is immoral.
The Trump budget is, like most budgets sent to Congress, dead on arrival, but we hope the principles evoked in it are kept by the Republican majorities. Governmental spending soared over the last eight years in the Obama administration. It is time to cut back the insanity, and the spending. It is time to get the federal government under control.