Perhaps Mnuchin would have had more detail if he had some help. He doesn’t have a deputy — there still isn’t a nominee. The last one, Goldman Sachs executive Jim Donovan, withdrew his name from consideration, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.
.. Nobody seems to have any idea what’s going on. The budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told a reporter that the budget Trump sent to Congress was not necessarily “indicative of what our proposals are.”
That was the budget from last week! You remember, the one that counted the same $2 trillion twice? But it presumed the tax cuts wouldn’t add to the deficit, and now that’s apparently back on the table.
Trump Can’t Add Things Up
His budget is out, and it predicts we will have super-duper, excellent, great — no, huge — economic growth based on monster tax cuts for the rich and cuts in spending that will leave the poor with no money to buy anything.
.. We’re being run like a bad Atlantic City casino.
.. It also presumes that a country with an aging population is going to spur economic growth by battling immigration.
.. And it has two names. “Well, it’s called the New Foundation for American Greatness, but I wanted to call it the Taxpayer First Budget,”
.. Thing that Won’t Add Up (TWAUP)
.. Perhaps they were remembering that one of Trump’s casinos went on to a career that involved ultimately being sold for 4 cents on the dollar.
.. Mulvaney claimed the new budget was all about “compassion.” It’s not everybody whose heart bleeds so much for wealthy taxpayers that he’s prepared to feed them the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
.. The goal of dismantling the social safety net, Mulvaney said, was to make recipients of federal aid “take charge of their own lives.” You could certainly do some of this by identifying, say, disabled Social Security recipients who might be capable of working and giving them the right training. But that presumes your goal is actually to make the programs better.
.. an administration that has made more than 54 nominations for the 500-plus top positions requiring Senate confirmation.
President Trump’s Growth Budget
It will restore the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reforms that made it more profitable to work than not work.
the measure of budget success for the Trump administration is not how much federal assistance is given out, but how many people leave government dependency and join the private labor force as full-fledged workers.
.. the best of government intentions have actually backfired by reducing incentives to work and earn.
.. The expansion of food stamps, welfare, health-insurance subsidies, unemployment assistance, and disability assistance have led to unintended consequences and perverse after-tax incentives, such that it pays more to stay on assistance then to go to work. At the working-poor margin, taking a job may rob you of Obamacare subsidies. So better off not to work.
.. Mulligan estimated that the marginal tax rate — the extra taxes paid and subsidies foregone as the result of working — had increased from 40 percent to 48 percent.
.. increase federal Medicaid spending from $378 billion today to $524 billion in 2027. That ain’t a cut either. It’s an increase.
.. Adding up each and every new year between now and 2027, the federal government will spend about $55 trillion. Do we think that’s enough? And the Trump budget would curb that by about 7 percent, or roughly $4 trillion. That’s all that’s happening.
A Freedom Caucus Republican says the foundation of the Trump budget is ‘a lie’
He called the assumption at odds with the historical record — pointing out that the current economic expansion of 94 months has already long outstripped the average American economic expansion: “But what you presume in this budget is not only will we not have a recession — though we’re in the third-longest economic expansion in history — but it’s going to keep going for another 214 months. It’s not only unprecedented; I would think that to be unreasonable.
.. “It would require either radically opening immigration or a radical change to demographics as we are having 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day,” Sanford said. “If you look at productivity growth, it would require numbers, again, that we haven’t seen since the golden days of 1958 to 1967 — in the final wave of electrification, consumer appliances and the completion of the highway system — to achieve what we’re seeing. Even if we went to 1990 numbers, we would only see one-quarter of what is necessary to achieve 3 percent growth.”
.. Mulvaney said. “We should stop and think how absurd that is to think that 3 percent growth in an American economy is to some people an absurd assumption. It used to be normal. Ten years ago it was normal. In fact, it’s been normal for the history of the country.”
.. Mulvaney added: “By the way, if you don’t, the budget will never balance. If you assume 1.9 percent growth, my guess is you’ll never see a balanced budget again. So we refuse to accept that that’s the new normal in this country.