On Monday, the president* released his proposed federal budget, on which all those brave souls who acquitted his guilty hindquarters will have to run this fall. Here is the Washington Post with the details.

The budget would cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program and also wring savings from Medicare despite Trump’s repeated promises to safeguard Medicare and Social Security. It takes aim at domestic spending with cuts that are sure to be rejected by Congress, including slashing the Environmental Protection Agency budget by 26.5 percent over the next year, and cutting the budget of the Health and Human Services department by 9 percent. HHS includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will see a budget cut even as the coronavirus spreads -- although officials said funding aimed at combating the coronavirus would be protected...

It would target the Education Department is for a nearly 8 percent cut, the Interior Department would be cut 13.4 percent, and the Housing and Urban Development department would be cut 15.2 percent. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development would be cut by 22 percent.



Trump proposes to increase spending for the Department of Homeland Security, while keeping Pentagon spending mostly flat. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget would increase by 12 percent as Trump has said he wants the agency to prepare for space travel to Mars. Even with all the proposed spending cuts, the budget would fail to eliminate the federal deficit over the next 10 years, missing a longtime GOP fiscal target. Instead, White House officials plan to say their budget proposal would close the deficit by 2035. But it would only achieve this if the economy grows at an unprecedented, sustained 3 percent clip through 2025, levels the administration has failed to achieve for even one year so far. The U.S. economy grew 2.3 percent in 2019, the weakest level since Trump took office.

Now, in a sane and functioning American republic, this budget would be more than political suicide. It would be the political equivalent of doing a Rasputin to yourself.

I mean, leaching funds from Medicare? Cutting the CDC in the middle of a pandemic? Cutting the EPA by a full quarter of its present budget? A ballooning deficit? There's something in there to enrage everyone from Bernie Sanders to Simpson and Bowles. However, on the morning that the president* dropped this dead fish on his own foot, people were lined up in the chill rain to attend his rally tonight, at which he will lie barefaced about everything in that budget. And they will eat up the lies in buckets because this is not a sane and functioning American republic any more. It is a huge terrarium containing every species of angry rube.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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