Okay...So now we see who will be Trump's scapegoat. Congress.
I know, I know. The Trumpkins and conservatives will surely have nothing better to say than that this post is some liberal BS or crying or somethin' like that. Well, it's neither liberal nor conservative to identify what is being spent, what has been projected and said, what people did, and how history happened, and that's all this post is about.
Where Things Are Currently Predicted (by economists, not the press) to Head:
Nevermind that two highly credible non-political organizations, the Campaign to Fix the Debt (CFTD) and Moody's Analytics, ages ago evaluated the impact of Trump's proposals and pronounced them vastly more expensive than Clinton's.
- CFTD
- Total 10-year debt increases: Clinton --> $0.25T; Trump --> $11.5T
- 10-Year Increase in Revenue: Clinton --> $1.20 trillion; Trump --> ($10.50) trillion
- 10-Year Increase in Primary Spending: Clinton--> $1.40 trillion; Trump --> ($0.65) trillion
- 10-Year Increase in Interest Costs: Clinton --> $0.05 trillion; Trump --> $1.70 trillion
- Debt as a Share of GDP in 2026 (current law: 86%): Clinton --> 87%; Trump --> 127%
-
- Moody's Analytics
- Clinton -- Projected net impact if she were to have gotten everything she proposed:
- Her proposals will result in budget deficits that are nearly $750 billion greater over 10 years than under current law.
- Trump -- Projected net impact if he gets everything he wants:
- Even on a static basis, the deficit in 2020, the last year of his term, will be close to $1 trillion greater than if there were no changes to tax and spending law. By 2026, the end of the budget horizon, the deficit will be almost $1.6 trillion greater.
Had the Trumpkins actually looked at Trump's website to see what his proposal was for the budget, they
may have noticed that he doesn't and never did have an actual budget plan. What's there is one side of the story - taxes, which he aims to collect less of them -- and the end of the story, essentially "it's gonna be great." As for a complete picture -- receipts and disbursements -- with some projected figures that give a bottom line indication of so much as his overall target, well, that's not there and it never was.
Additionally, in December 2016, the CBO released "
Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2017 to 2026." I can't imagine low-information Trumpkins actually bothering to read the thing, but, essentially, the report is a quantification of the projected savings attributable, individually and in total, to the whole wish list of spending cuts over which anyone - Libertarian, GOP or Democrat - might fantasize.
- Slash the number of federal employees and gut their pensions
- End all subsidized loans for those fancy-pants elitist college students
- Stop subsidizing Amtrak? Scrap NASA’s human space-exploration program
- Finish off Head Start
- Cutting all highway funding that isn’t paid for by highway tolls?
- Eliminate Obamacare completely
- Slash spending on Medicaid
- Convert the federal employees’ health benefits program into a cheaper voucher plan
All of that and more is in the CBO report.
And what is the maximum savings to be had if Congress were to implement every single cut? About $4 trillion, or approximately 8% of the already planned and committed spending between now and 2026. And the crazy thing is that what all those cuts would mean for Americans is no Head Start, no replacement for Obamacare -just back to the emergency room, and if you’re sick and you lost your health insurance when you got laid off, too bad, you die - and no Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for disabled children.
Too many people actually think the bulk of the federal budget is spent on “lazy federal bureaucrats,” iPhones and freebies for “welfare queens” and “illegals.” How can people not understand that if the U.SC. could cut taxes and balance the budget by cutting out waste, everyone would be on that bandwagon faster 'an a hot knife through butter.
Do you see that? The stuff that is welfare is about 14% of Medicare spending, and about 5% of all mandatory spending. And what's mandatory?
What People Wanting a "Great Again" America Want to See Happen:
The shame of it is that the people most responsible for putting Trump in office are the people of his generation, the people born right after the end of WWII. People whose worldview was shaped by the 1950s - 1970s. They are people whose "glory days," were in the 1960s and 1970s.
Everyone's "glory days" are their 20s and 30s when you're hot, horny, strapin', and strong; you could party at night and all day long....when the world was your oyster and pearl lay around every corner...when there was no way you'd bend over to pick up something and for no apparent reason strain your back and barely be able to move for four days and you could still feel a twinge of it weeks later if you moved just the right way. If you asked me when was America great? It'd be the '80s and '90s. People born about 10-15 years after me will, if they don't already, say 'twas the '90s and aughts.
Be that as it may, the late middle 20th century is time Trump's generation think is when America was great. And if you were white and male at the time, it was. It's no surprise. It was the time of sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's been ages since 20- and 30-somethings have been able to routinely have nearly as much fun. The world was relatively simple.
Our enemies abroad were very clearly defined and understood because they had countries and we could bomb them and everyone we may have killed doing so was the enemy. At home, white people were the "good guys," even the ones McCarthy accused, were better than everyone else, all of whom ranged from tolerable so long as they knew their place to not as good as white family's worst dog." Quite literally, if a white person said such and such, that's exactly what it was, what happened, when, and how. If the person who said it was rich, male and white, well, not only was the matter not open to question, it was gospel. Period.
Western Europe and Japan had not recovered from WWII. The U.S. effectively "owned" the Arab States, thus all the oil we wanted. There was nobody who even dared challenge the U.S. until the Vietnamese stood up to us and sent us packing with our heads hung low. Call me crazy, but I think the Vietnam war is
the event that showed the world that the U.S. wasn't necessarily "all that."
"
Girls were girls" and, despite "Archie's" lamentations, "men were men." Men worked and women raised children and tended to their husband's every whim "because he provided them with all those lovely pots, pans, irons and washing machines." (If you've actually looked into Islam, not the crap you get from the partisan political press, you'll notice that's exactly how Islam thinks things ought to be.) You treated your wife like a trophy, at least in public and she went along with the program. Rich or poor, that's the way it worked because back then, culturally at least, women had not yet exerted what folks in my generation sometimes call the "power of the pus*y."
That's how it worked in the '60s and 70's generations' parents' homes and their kids wanted it as close to that as they could possibly make it when they grew up. That's what Trump wants. It's what the largest segment of his supporters want, and the biggest chunk of his supporters are his age,
and the budget, by far, goes to Americans who are over 65 years old. The majority of them are, as goes economics and most other things that require a good deal of formal training and strong critical thinking skills, ignorant. It's not their fault, per se, it's just that in their day, as I said, things were clearer and simpler, and
nobody needed to have a college degree to enjoy a very nice lifestyle. And mostly, nobody had a college degree. Quite literally, "mighty white was always right," or at least was never wrong. That dictum worked for economic policy, international policy, social policy, shirts, dishes, towels and underwear. It even worked for houses.
Those people of Trump's era haven't changed much, but the world they're retiring in has, and Trump curried their favor by promising that he could bring back those "glory days." Short of that it's merely a matter that older voters are the most reliable group of voters, but due to their limited (by today's standards) formal education, they are also the most easily bamboozled by the promises of a very rich white guy.
Very rich white guys are who ran the world they grew up in and that they loved. Quite simply, older white folks trust rich white guys. They see Trump and his very beautiful wife Melania and conjure images of this.
Zsa Zsa Gabor and Conrad Hilton
Jack Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier
Now that's all well and good. I wish the fantasy came close to the reality. It doesn't. In fiscal 2017 Social Security and Medicare alone will cost some $1.7 billion. That’s more that's pushing ten times as much as all “welfare,” including Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, family support, and child nutrition. What’s more, just over a
fifth of all Medicaid also goes to the over-65s - for example, on nursing home costs for those who have run out of assets.
Older Americans in this Trump Budget Coalition take up by far the lion’s share of the spending. Defense, veterans, Medicare, Social Security, net interest on the debt, plus Medicaid for the over-65s account for the majority of the federal budget and soak up 75% of all current U.S. tax revenue. In 10 years’ time that’s expected to be almost 90%, even under the current tax regime.
Yet the over-65s - by a margin of
eight percentage points - just elected a president who has promised to increase spending on defense and veterans while drastically slashing taxes.
So now, here we are. Trump won the election, and it's becoming clearer and clearer to him that close to nothing he promised will pan out as he promised it, so he needs a scapegoat. That's Congress because this time around, it can't be the Democrats. As goes Trump's image and credibility among his own generation, the best thing that can happen is that Democrats retake one house of Congress because if they don't, we're going to see four solid years of Republican infighting that produces no better results than have the past eight years of intransigence.
