Trump Wants Dramatic Cuts To Children’s Programs To Pay For Corporate Tax Breaks
As Democrats and Republicans work to keep the federal government open, attempting to pass a comprehensive budget plan before December 22, a new study shows that President Donald Trump wants to significantly reduce spending on children’s education and health care.
Released Tuesday by the Urban Institute, the analysis found that the proposed budget would reduce federal spending on education by 15 percent, children’s health care spending by 10 percent and spending on child-related nutrition by 9 percent.
“When you cut spending on children you’re putting our country’s future economic growth at risk,” said Julia B. Isaacs, author of the study. “You’re undercutting our commitment to helping every child succeed no matter what their backgroundthis is a refutation of the American Dream.”
The cuts to funding for children’s programs would help offset the estimated $1 trillion deficit the Trump tax plan would create. The GOP tax plan largely benefits corporations and corporate shareholders by lowering their tax rate to 20 percent from 36 percent.
Today Im joining bipartisan governors to insist that Congress stop putting our kids on the backburner and reauthorize funding for the Childrens Health Insurance Program .
Governor Tom Wolf
Funding for special education in Michigan has dropped 16 percent in the last five years. Think about that. Weve got to fix it.
Abdul El-Sayed, MD, DPhil
Cutting Core Infrastructure Funding Will Lead To Crumbling Infrastructure Job Losses And Deepening Regional Inequality
Despite repeatedly promising to invest in the nations infrastructure, President Trumps proposed budget calls for dramatic cuts to core federal infrastructure programs. The largest cut would be to the Highway Trust Fund, which provides essential funding for highway, bridge, and public transportation programs. Extrapolating out from the most recent Congressional Budget Office analysis, the Trump budget proposal would result in a cut of $164 billion to the Highway Trust Fund over fiscal years 2021 through 2028. Funding cuts and job losses are broken down for each state here.
Additionally, the budget calls for the immediate elimination of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant as well as pushing a substantial share of the cost of Amtrak long-distance routes onto states. The budget would also eliminate the Federal Transit Administrations New Starts programwhich provides significant funding to transit authorities for the construction of major new bus and rail projectsonce all existing grant agreements are completed.
Cuts To Social Security Take Benefits Away From Wounded Warriors
President Trumps budget cuts Social Security benefits by at least $24 billion over 10 years despite the Presidents claims he would leave Social Security alone. This cut reflects $11 billion of the Presidents vague $63 billion disability reform to restructure and reduce federal disability benefits including Social Securitys Disability Insurance program along with payment integrity measures affecting programs administered by the Social Security Administration. The budget is silent on how much of the total $63 billion cut comes from DI versus other disability programs, so the total Social Security cut in the budget is unknown, but it is likely much larger than $24 billion. The DI benefits provide coverage for severely disabled workers and their dependents, including veterans. The budget cut to DI benefits could financially harm wounded warriorsapproximately 621,000 military veterans received these benefits in 2016.
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Trump Broke This Promise From The Beginning
This is Trump on the campaign trail in 2015:
I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.
Donald J. Trump May 7, 2015
Trumps budgets and the policies he has supported around health care and government spending in Congress reflect the opposite. Some of this can be attributed to Trumps appointed budget chief Mick Mulvaney the former Congress member who was part of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus has long rallied for cutting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.
In fact, Mulvaney once bragged to a Politico reporter that he tricked Trump into accepting a proposal to cut Social Security by calling SSDI just disability insurance spinning it to the president as general welfare reform. The idea has been in every single one of Trumps budget proposals to Congress since the president came to office.
Then there was the Republican Obamacare repeal push every bill proposed massive cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for tax cuts elsewhere. Trump supported every iteration of Republicans Obamacare repeal-and-replace bills. He even held a party for House Republicans in the White House Rose Garden when the lower chamber of Congress narrowly passed a proposal that slashed more than $800 billion from Medicaid over 10 years.
Now his policy positions around those programs break from that promise.
A Progressive Agenda For Working Families
Despite the determination and work ethic of parents such as Kelly, too many young children in the United States grow up in families struggling to make ends meet. Without proper supports, these children will experience stressors that affect their long-term development. Fortunately, it is possible to dramatically cut child poverty and ensure that children have a strong start in life. It simply requires protecting families access to programs that help them meet their basic needs and have been shown to positively affect child outcomes.
Yet instead of addressing the needs of families, President Trump and his congressional allies plan to slash funding to these critical programs and increase barriers to accessing benefit programs. If Congress and the administration were serious about supporting families and promoting work, they would focus on passing the following bills, which have already been introduced in Congress and which would help families find and maintain employment and achieve financial security:
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Trumps Biggest Decision Areas
Often, the promises made by a candidate tend to differ from what they actually execute while in office, and Trumpâs presidency is no exception. One of the promises made by Trump during his campaign was to eliminate the national debt, a feat achieved by only one other president in history, Andrew Jackson.
Trump had two strategies to reduce the debt. First, he promised to increase tax revenues. Trump and the National Debt While originally promising to grow the economy by 6 percent, Trump immediately cut that estimate to 2-3 percent once he assumed office.
This was a wise move in that, while rapid growth sounds appealing, growing too rapidly can lead to boom-bust cycles and bubbles based on irrationality that usually end in recession.
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Other proposals would cut down on reimbursement rates to healthcare providers, reducing how much doctors, hospitals, and hospices are paid for providing healthcare. Cutting Medicare reimbursement rates is a controversial strategy in the past, its received both support and criticism from Democrats and Republican alike. Some say cutting reimbursement rates saves taxpayers money by cutting into medical industry profits. And the Trump administrations budgets highlights specific instances where they believe reimbursement rates for doctors are excessive: for example, they cite the fact that doctors offices owned by hospitals are often paid more for performing the same procedures than independent physicians.
But cutting reimbursement rates also means that some seniors could lose access to their favorite doctors. Dan Adcock, director of government relations at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said of the cuts to Medicare, he was most worried about the lower reimbursement rates. When reimbursement rates decrease, “you start to affect access, because doctors decide they can’t make a decent living,” said Adcock.
The Budget Takes Aim At Social Security Disability Insurance
Trumps proposed budget contains a number of changes to Social Security Disability Insurance . SSDI is a federal program that protects workers who develop a life-changing disability after having paid into the fund by earning work credits.
Veterans Issues Are a Bright Spot
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Benefits Cuts Mean Young Children Lose Out
Rather than protect programs that support families ability to meet their basic needs during childrens formative years, President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are cutting program funding and creating barriers to accessing services. For example, the Trump administration has already approved new rules that make it harder for families to access Medicaid under the guise of so-called work requirements in certain states and has proposed imposing time limits and restrictions on other programs, such as nutrition assistance and housing assistance.53 In some instances, the Trump administration has proposed cuts that specifically target children. For example, Trumps fiscal year 2019 budget proposes slashing SSI benefits for families that include multiple people with disabilities, including more than 300,000 families with at least one child.54
When children are young, their intensive physical and emotional needs often create a barrier to stable, full-time employment for parents, especially because many low-wage workers lack access to paid leave.55 Parents may need to miss work to care for a sick child or cut back on their hours, and, as a result, they may not meet their states requirements even if they are working. Some may leave the workforce altogether to be a full-time caregiver.
National Debt Under Trump
The national debt under President Trump increased from $20,244,900,016,053 to $27,751,896,236,415 . Treasury Direct: Debt to the Penny That’s $5.138 billion a day.
In less than one term, the debt under Trumpâs presidency increased more than $7.5 trillion. In comparison, only Barack Obama had increased national debt more, totaling $8.3 trillion throughout his 8 years as President.
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Why The Middle Class Is Losing Ground
Several factors are widening the gulf between the middle class and the rich in the U.S., the CBO says. Most important, top earners are grabbing a larger share of the nation’s overall income, which could be due to “superstar” workers and top executives receiving huge pay packages, according to the non-partisan agency.
Secondly, capital gains the income earned from property or investments like stocks have grown much faster than the income from labor. In other words, a rank-and-file worker can’t hope to match the income booked by a wealthy investor’s portfolio. Income from labor will grow at an average annual rate of 1.3% between 2016 and 2021, while capital gains will increase at an annual rate of 6.3% over the same period, the CBO estimates.
That trend overwhelmingly favors the rich. The CBO notes that capital gains contributed less than 2% of income for the bottom 99% of U.S. income earners, but accounts for 22% of the total income for the country’s richest 1% of households.
President Trumps Extreme Budget Cuts Hurt Veterans
President Trumps latest budget fails our veterans and their families by drastically slashing crucial programs they rely on. This President prioritizes the rich and powerful over the wellbeing of American families, including our veterans. Just like his prior budgets, he extends the failed GOP tax law that showered benefits on the wealthy, adding $1.5 trillion more to debt over the next decade exacerbating the $1.9 trillion hole it blew in our deficit. The President extends these tax breaks largely for the rich all while maliciously cutting programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other crucial programs. Destructive cuts to these programs hurt millions of veterans and their families who depend on them for their health, safety, and economic wellbeing.
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Trump Releases Budget Hitting His Own Voters Hardest
The president’s proposal for next year’s federal spending calls for more than $1 trillion in cuts to social programs, including farm aid.
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA, MATTHEW NUSSBAUM and SARAH FERRIS
05/22/2017 09:00 PM EDT
05/23/2017 01:45 PM EDT
The Trump administration is relying on more than aggressive cuts to mandatory programs to achieve its goal of eliminating the deficit within 10 years a gold standard of budget-writing. | AP Photo
Donald Trump, whose populist message and promises to help American workers propelled him to the White House, issued a budget proposal on Tuesday that instead takes aim at the social safety net on which many of his supporters rely.
Rather than breaking with Washington precedent, Trumps spending blueprint follows established conservative orthodoxy, cutting taxes on the wealthy, boosting defense spending and taking a hatchet to programs for the poor and disabled potentially hurting many of the rural and low-income Americans who voted him into office.
The budget proposal underscores the wide gulf between campaigning and governing, even for a president who promised to rewrite the presidential rule book.
Trump also proposes some of the deepest cuts to agriculture subsidies since Ronald Reagan, squeezing out nearly $50 billion over 10 years.
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