The White House’s proposal, full of cuts to major programs, aims to balance the federal budget in a decade – benefitting the rich as it clobbers the poor

The only good news about Trump's budget? It's unlikely to pass

Donald Trump launched a budget proposal Tuesday and, as may not be a surprise, it’s a horror. The pompously titled A New Foundation for American Greatness is a rightwing wish list of tax cuts for the rich and beatings for the poor. Fortunately, as with most things Trump, it’s as likely to become reality as his “great big beautiful wall”.



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The aim of the budget is to balance the federal budget in a decade – a noble goal that would be achieved by the ignoble means of substantially cutting spending on programs to help the needy while encouraging faster economic growth by cutting taxes for the rich. The plan that has shown little evidence of working elsewhere.



Who loses? Poor people. Over the next 10 years:

$616bn would be cut from Medicaid, the federal insurance programme for low-income people that Trump promised not to cut on the campaign trail, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which helps states insure low-income children.



$193bn would be cut from food stamps, officially known as the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap), which helps low income Americans feed their families.



$250bn would be saved by repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, the administration says.



$143bn would be cut from student loan programs.



$72bn would be cut from disability programs.

Science, medical research, the arts – all would see cuts. The list goes on and on.

Among the more Trumpian touches is a plan to save $40bn by barring undocumented immigrants from collecting tax credits aimed at low- and middle-income families especially with children.



It’s not all bad. Thanks to the saintly Ivanka Trump, surely our generation’s Lady Di, some $19bn would be set aside to provide six weeks of paid leave to new parents. Paid leave for parents is good, right? Sure, if you’re rich, according to New York University’s Ajay Chaudry and Taryn Morrissey of American University, co-authors of Cradle to Kindergarten, a recent book on paid leave and childcare.

They calculate that Trump’s plan will mostly help affluent parents who already have paid leave through their employers and who would benefit from a tax write-off for childcare, while the proposal does nothing for parents in low-wage jobs.



So who else benefits? Taxpayers, according to Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director. “This is, I think, the first time in a long time that an administration has written a budget through the eyes of the people who are actually paying the taxes,” Mulvaney told reporters.



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Sure, there are other beneficiaries. About $2.6bn would be spent on border security – most of it on the proposed border wall with Mexico. Military spending would rise 10%.



But the growth will supposedly come from Trump’s equally preposterous tax cut plans for businesses and individuals – a move that will boost the US’s somewhat lackluster growth to 3% over the next decade, according to Mulvaney.



The Congressional Budget Office has US growth pegged at a full percentage point less than that, the Federal Reserve has it at 1.8%. Experts! What do they know? “The CBO assumes that we’ll never grow at more than 1.9% again,” said Mulvaney. “That assumes a pessimism about America, about the economy, about its people, about its culture, that we refuse to accept.”



Sadly, the Fed and CBO are not alone. Most serious economists doubt the US economy will grow consistently at 3% for the next decade. In the Washington Post, Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, called it “a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course”.

Yes, you could have a short-term boost from tax cuts, but an ageing population and the decline in the productivity surge the US enjoyed during the tech boom make a long-term gain in economic growth unlikely.

If this budget passed and Trumponomics failed to improve the economy, the net result would be expanded income inequality and an increased national debt. Sad!

So now what? US budgets are always more philosophical tracts than blueprints. The plan will have to fight its way through Congress, where Democrats and more liberal Republicans are already balking at plans to cut holes in a social safety net that has been saving down-on-their-luck Americans from penury and worse since Lyndon Johnson was president. Try selling cuts to Meals on Wheels to constituents already worried about losing Obamacare protections.



The president, meanwhile, is on his first overseas trip and unavailable to push forward the budget’s ambitious agenda – almost as if he, too, thinks the plan is dead in the water.



But the bad taste that this budget will leave in the mouth of America should not be forgotten if and when it gets eviscerated in Congress. What the budget proves is the Trump agenda to make America great again means making it better for the rich and worse for the poor.

