Bernie Sanders

Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s budget director, recently made a truly remarkable and cynical statement. He claimed the draconian cuts in the president’s budget were “one of the most compassionate things we can do” for a single mother living in Detroit.

Really? Let’s look at what Trump’s “compassion” actually means for that mother, her two children and tens of millions of other working-class Americans.

If Trump’s budget becomes law, the after school programs that provide both enrichment and a safe space for Mick Mulvaney’s hypothetical mother’s children while she is still at work would be ended.The Trump budget eliminates the federally-funded afterschool program— the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program. “Compassion,” according to the Trump administration, would throw 1.1 million children into the streets or leave them home alone instead of in a safe environment for care and learning when the school day ends.

In the classroom, teachers would be less prepared because this “compassionate” budget eliminates funding for professional development and support for teachers in high-need schools.

As a single mother in Detroit, her greatest hope is that her children will be able to attend college. That dream is even more distant because this budget would slash Pell grants and eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, putting education further out of reach for at least 1.5 million students.

The budget could cut as much as $1 billion from Head Start which means some 95,000 children will be thrown out of early education and child-care programs, among them, this mother’s younger child. Moreover, according to Mulvaney, under the Trump budget, nutrition assistance for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would be cut by $100 million, enough to eliminate nutrition assistance for nearly 150,000 people.

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This single mother’s parents would likewise suffer under this “compassionate” budget, as their weekly visits from Meals on Wheels could be eliminated, due to cuts to the Community Development Block Grant along with other programs. Next winter their house could have no heat because the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program has been abolished. As a result, they can no longer live independently. If Republicans eventually succeed with their plans for health care, nursing home care is out of the question, because of $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the largest source of funding for nursing home care.

With no other choice, her parents move into her apartment, adding more stress to her already precarious position.

“Compassion” from the Trump White House for this single mother living in Detroit includes $6.2 billion in cuts to affordable housing programs which could force her out of her apartment.

If the eviction notice arrives, she will not have a lawyer to defend her in court because this “compassionate” budget would eliminate the Legal Services Corporation.

Any hope this single mother living in Detroit had for a new, better paying job could be dashed because Donald Trump’s budget would eliminate more than 200,000 federal jobs and slash funding for job-training programs.

Trump’s 31% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency means this woman’s children would likely be breathing dirtier air and drinking contaminated water. And the 18% cut to the National Institutes of Health would mean that research for cures to some of the worst diseases facing humanity would be delayed.

Mulvaney claims that “compassion” means not asking Americans, like this single mother in Detroit for her “hard-earned money anymore . . . unless we can guarantee that money will be used in a proper function.”

Yet over this year and next, President Trump is proposing a massive increase in the already bloated military budget.

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Let’s be absolutely clear. When Mulvaney talks about spending taxpayer money “carefully,” he really means abandoning programs that will help millions of working-class Americans so that the Pentagon can get an $84 billion increase in spending over the next year and a half. According to new analysis released on February 14, 2017, the United States spends as much on its national defense as the next 12 countries combined, many of which are our close allies and strategic partners. And, according to a recent study, the Pentagon has “buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste.” Moreover, the Pentagon’s $1.44 trillion acquisition portfolio currently suffers from more than $469 billion in contractor cost overruns.

So much for Mulvaney’s promise to spend taxpayer money more carefully.

Far from compassionate, this budget — if enacted — would be one of the cruelest in American history. In the words of former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the four star general who warned us about the power of the military industrial complex, it, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

This budget, and its absurd priorities, must be soundly defeated.

Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, is a U.S. senator from Vermont.

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