Trump's Utterly Irresponsible Budget

For all eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans whined and moaned about budget deficits yet now between the Trump tax cuts and the budget deal put in place last week, the federal deficit will explode.  Now, making matters worse, Der Trumpenführer has proposed a budget and an infrastructure plan that would savage domestic programs that literally keep many alive, sell of federal properties to rapacious private interests, and cripple states with infrastructure spending.  Meanwhile, the wealthy get richer and richer.  And under public/private infrastructure programs, corporate interest rape much of the public. Locally, the Elizabeth River Tunnels project - a legacy of the McDonnell administration - has shown just how greedy private interests can be as the poor and working class find themselves burdened with crush tolls and penalties that they will never be able to payoff.  Making matters worse, the Commonwealth of Virginia is criminalizing these financially desperate people by refusing to renew auto registrations and subjecting the financially stressed to criminal fines.  One can only speculate the ugliness of such a program taken nationwide.  America seems headed toward a banana republic status save for having a huge military.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the troubling picture.  Here are excerpts:  

FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make it happen — at least temporarily. The hangover, economic and political, is always painful.

President Trump’s fiscal record so far is very much in the reckless spirit of such erstwhile Latin American strongmen . . . . no nation can defy the laws of fiscal gravity forever; and the president’s own budget planfor fiscal 2019, issued Monday, demonstrates how the margin for financial error is rapidly diminishing.

Thanks to policies pursued by Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress — a massive tax cut, followed last week by legislation to increase federal spending by about $300 billion over the next two years — it has become impossible for the president to forecast a balanced budget by 2027, as he did last year. Instead, it is projected the deficit would still equal more than 1 percent of total economic output in that year, having swollen well above 4 percent in each year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Even those numbers are wildly optimistic, because his budget proposal assumes, unrealistically, that economic output will expand at about a 2.9 percent annual rate over the next decade and that Congress will reduce non-defense discretionary spending 40 percent in the same period, with programs for low-income people bearing most of the cuts.

[W]ith the economy running at or near full employment, a prudent government would stop priming the pump with tax cuts and spending increases and begin adopting long-term fixes to entitlement programs that drive long-term debt. Every dollar Mr. Trump adds to the debt amid today’s prosperity makes it that much more difficult for a future government to respond to future recessions, wars or natural disasters.

[W]hat we have is the antithesis of functional government, if functional government is defined as the establishment of clear public priorities, combined with reasonable measures to fund them. 

What is most telling to me is that the vast majority of evangelical Christians continue to support Trump even as his policies demonstrate that he views the poor and needy elderly as little more than disposable garbage that should be left to die.  What we are seeing is also the antithesis of the Gospel message that the Republican base bloviates about and then disregards.