The $4.8 trillion budget proposed by President Trump was quickly dismissed as unrealistic by deficit hawks and, among liberal Democrats, as a betrayal of his long-held promise to avoid cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In fact, it looks like Trump may have walked into an election-year trap by advocating huge spending reductions to satisfy his conservative base while offering lots of red meat to the Democrats in their opposition to the president. Worse yet for the provocative chief executive, his budget stands no chance at all of winning approval in Congress.

An August deal hammered out by Trump in talks with the House and Senate would have raised spending for both defense and domestic spending. But under the new 2021 budget announced over the weekend, the Pentagon figure is the same and overall domestic spending is cut by as much as 6 percent through changes to an array of federal programs and agencies, according to the watchdog group known as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that his budget wouldn’t touch Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid – a promise he has routinely made since 2015. On Sunday, the budget proposal released to the public included a $920 billion cut over the coming decade for Medicaid, $756 billion for Medicare and $47 billion from Social Security disability programs.

Phony math

In addition, Trump’s bid to lower the $1 trillion deficit relies on phony math by offering a rosy look at future growth in revenues, a trick that has become commonplace over the past two decades by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

“Frankly, budgeting has become pretty much a joke in this country, where budgets are used as messaging documents and an excuse to trade insults. This year’s trillion-dollar deficit should cause us to re-think this dynamic,” said Maya MacGuineas, CRFB president.

“The president and Congress should work to agree on national priorities and sound plans to pay for them. Sure, it sounds like a pipe dream, but in the world’s largest economy, it should be a given.”

While Trump has abandoned his grandiose 2016 projections of annual growth in the 4 percent, 5 percent, even 6 percent range, the president still makes claims about a flood of future revenues that don’t match reality.

The White House claims we will see 3.1 percent average annual growth over the next 10 years, more than the GDP gains in any of Trump’s first three years in office, despite unemployment levels that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

The economy grew by 2.3 percent last year while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected growth will slow further to 2.2 percent this year.

The result of all this is that Trump’s reductions to the federal “safety net” would leave the budget deficit only slightly smaller at the end of a possible second term for the president, in 2024, than it was the year before he took office. Trump’s words have no meaning.

The projected deficit in Trump’s first budget has now more than doubled. Since 2017, the federal budget has experienced an annual loss of about $300 billion in revenues and $200 billion in spending.

$18 billion for Space Force

While the president relies on that well-worn tripe about eliminating waste and fraud to balance the budget, his spending plan for 2021 hopes to impose cuts to student loan assistance, affordable housing, food stamps and, of course, healthcare for the elderly and the poor.

At the same time, the president wants to extend his tax cuts beyond 2025 while boosting the defense budget, including $18 billion for his newly created Space Force.

MacGuineas of the CRFB offers this conclusion: “Actions speak louder than words, and over the past three years the president has signed $4.7 trillion of new debt into law. Digging our way out of that hole will require tax and spending changes far greater than what the President has proposed here.”

Meanwhile, some of the Democratic presidential candidates embrace massive increases in government spending, with the hope that large tax increases on the wealthy can somehow pay for this expansion of government. Yet, Democrats were given a gift by the Trump budget, a long list of highly unpopular budget cuts that provide potent ammunition in the fall presidential campaign.

Another group of fiscal conservatives, The Concord Coalition, also reacted with disappointment and derision in response to the proposed budget sent to Congress.

“What the president’s budget does best is illustrate how deep the fiscal ditch has become over the past three years and how difficult it will be to get out of it without putting everything on the table,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the coalition.

“Even with rosy economic assumptions and proposed spending discipline that flies in the face of recent experience, the president’s budget would still be in deficit over the next 10 years.”

 

 

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