Trump Budget Slashes Medicaid, Social Safety Net Programs

"Populist" hero and world- class con man Donald "Rump" Trump is proposing a cut of $800 billion in Medicaid as well as other social safety net programs over the next 10 years ($1.7 trillion in all). His 2018 budget proposal lays the basis for using cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) to balance nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts mostly benefitting the wealthiest Americans (i.e., via the TrumpCare abomination). But these proposals are just the beginning of the income redistribution upward:

The proposed changes to Medicaid and SNAP will be just some of several anti-poverty programs that the White House will look to change. In March, the White House signaled that it wanted to eliminate money for a range of other programs that are funded each year by Congress. This included federal funding for Habitat for Humanity, subsidized school lunches and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness across 19 federal agencies.

This, as part and parcel of the longstanding effort by Republicans to destroy affordable health care and the social safety net in this country, must be a petard on which their heads should be hoisted, hopefully starting in Montana on Thursday (where Democrat Rob Quist is hammering on affordable health care), then on to Georgia on June 20 (where Democrat Jon Ossoff is hanging Rump around his opponent's neck).

Voters who support Republicans might want to think about this:

I wonder how many Trump voters plan on taking in their elderly parents when these cuts go through? https://t.co/67NXe5qXNh

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) May 21, 2017

Today's Cartoon Threefer - Hell On Wheels

(click on images to enlarge)


(Jim Morin, Miami Herald)


(Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle)


(Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Sunday Reading - Trump's Budget For A Dystopian America

Newspaper editorial boards across the country are reacting strongly to neo- fascist sociopath Donald "Rump" Trump's draconian 2018 budget proposal.  While the proposal as a whole has zero chance of passing into law, it's useful as a gauge of Rump's mean- spirited and retrograde Republican Party. We've checked newspapers across the country from Ohio to Colorado to Minnesota to Texas to California, and there's universal outrage at the "vision" Rump provides in this noxious document. Below are just a few samples of opinion.

The Miami Herald sums it up nicely:

Trump not only loves the uneducated, as he crowed to a cheering crowd after winning the Nevada caucuses a year ago, he seems to have a warm spot in his heart for the unfed, the uncultured, the unhealthy, the unsheltered and the unprotected. He must because his vision creates so many of them.

The Charlotte Observer notes the cruel zeroing out of the "Meals on Wheels" program and contrasts it with another ongoing expense:

... As Trump’s budget chief Mick Mulvaney asked skeptically Thursday: “Can we ask the taxpayer to pay for this?” 

Actually, yes. Studies show Meals on Wheels helps lower Medicaid costs by keeping the elderly out of more expensive nursing homes. But Mulvaney’s question is a good one. We should ask it more. 

How about this: Should we ask the taxpayer to pay for our president leaving the White House most weekends to enjoy his Florida resort, Mar-A-Lago? Those visits, which cost taxpayers an estimated $3 million a pop, have already accounted for a fifth of the tax dollars Barack Obama spent on such travel throughout his whole presidency. 

By the way, that $3 million for one Trump getaway? That would pay for almost a decade’s worth of Meals on Wheels in a city the size of Charlotte.

Let's not forget the cost of Rump's yuuuge, beautiful wall, either.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs through the proposal and sees soullessness at its core:

Any budget is about priorities. It’s about ranking the spending that the budget-maker thinks is important. A budget defines a household, a business, a charity, a nation. A budget, as they’re fond of saying in Washington, is a moral document. Not this one. 

The budget outline that President Donald Trump unveiled Thursday is profoundly disturbing. For the first time, the president has put dollar signs on his dystopian priorities. “If he said it in the campaign, it’s in the budget,” White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday. [snip] 

This is the blueprint for Trump’s America. It is repellent and immoral. It cannot stand.

The New York Times calls it a "full tear- down" budget:

This is, of course, very much a political document, full of bluster and preposterous cuts that Mr. Trump must know that Congress, including many Republicans, will not accept. But the spirit behind the “budget blueprint” is clear enough: With a few big exceptions, Mr. Trump is in full tear-down mode. [snip] 

One possible, even plausible, reason for the substance-lite nature of the document, which makes meaningful debate about it impossible, is incompetence. Or the administration could be deploying a piecemeal strategy to make it harder for the public to follow its thinking. [snip] 

This document is at once scary and uninformative. Taken at face value, it would impose pain for pain’s sake. Looked at more broadly, it tees up spending cuts that will be needlessly deep in order to accommodate tax cuts.

Again, this is useful only as a demonstration of the id of the Republican Party.  It's the same "afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" philosophy that's been animating these sociopaths for half a century. As far as wondering why this proposal is "substance-lite," we'll opt for the incompetence rationale.

BONUS:  For a more expansive, eclectic reading list, look no further than Infidel's link round-up. Highly recommended.

Trump's FY 2018 Budget: A "Vast, Noxious Swamp" Of Conservative Governance

Our latest villain, OMB Director Mick "Dick" Mulvaney, should know about swamps. He just created one.

Nothing we could say would better summarize the dystopian cruelty of the Trump/ Mulvaney FY 2018 budget proposal than what Mr. Pierce said:

This proposed budget isn't extreme. Reagan's proposed budget in 1981 was extreme. This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich. [snip] 

This is it, right here, this budget. This is the beau ideal of movement conservative governance. This is the logical, dystopian end of Reaganism, and Gingrichism, and Tea Partyism, and all the other Isms that movement conservatism has inflicted upon the political commonwealth. This is the vast, noxious swamp into which all those tributaries of modern conservative thought have emptied themselves. People die in there, swallowed up in deep sinkholes of empowered bigotry and class anger. 

Meals on Wheels? 

Who in the hell zeroes out Meals on Wheels? Who decides that a program that spends $3 million to help volunteers feed the elderly and infirm in their communities is something that the country can no longer afford? Who are the men in the meetings who make this kind of call? What are their names? Trot them out so the country knows who they are. C'mon, David Brooks, find out who they are and explain why National Greatness Conservatism has a problem with starving elderly shut-ins.

It's the ne plus ultra budget of we've been calling the "afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" doctrine of "modern" Republicanism. It's one of the great regrets of our lives that we have to breathe the same air and inhabit the same country as these vicious sociopaths.

There's a lot more at the link.  There's a summary of the budget here. We need to cool off again.

Today's Cartoon - We'll Be Winning So Much, It'll Hurt

(click on image to enlarge)


(Ruben Bolling, via Daily Kos)

See post below.  Budget summary here.

Portrait Of A Villain: Mick Mulvaney (UPDATED)

Former Rep. Mick "Dick" Mulvaney (R- Cradle of Secession) is now neo- fascist orange sociopath Donald "Rump" Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to our great peril as a functioning democracy. As one of the original Tea Party dimwits elected in 2010, Mulvaney had as pure a right- wing pedigree while in Congress as you can imagine (Tea Party Caucus, Freedom Caucus, "Shutdown" Caucus) and was a hardliner in attempts to shut down the government in 2015, because "Planned Parenthood baby parts!" In short, he's a real piece of work.

Recent comments by "Dick" confirm his dickitude and his villainy.

On Tuesday's Squint and the Meat Puppet Show, "Dick" was questioned about that turd circling the drain, otherwise known as TrumpCare; in particular, the CBO projection that by 2026, 24 million more people would lose their health insurance coverage. "Dick's" response:

"Coverage is not the end. People don't get better with coverage. They get better with care."

How exactly that works for the poor, the working families and people on fixed incomes was not explained by "Dick," because tax cuts for the wealthy (taking $880 billion out of Medicaid and turning $600 billion over to the wealthy and favored interest groups)!!!

Then comes the release of the orange sociopath's "afflict the afflicted and comfort the comforted" FY 2018 budget proposal (summary here). "Dick" was asked about the severe cutback in the non- defense workforce (EPA alone on the chopping block to lose 3,200 positions). He responded as the villain he is:

"You can't drain the swamp and leave all the people in it."

This after Rump added even more Goldman Sachs masters of the universe to his administration, to join the unprecedented number of millionaire/ billionaire wreckers already in place. But, to this douche, tax- paying, family- supporting, hard- working everyday Americans who work as civil servants are the people in "the swamp." We'll just leave it at that and go try to cool off.

BONUS:  Separated at birth?


OMB Director Mick "Dick" Mulvaney


Actor and fellow wingnut Clint Howard

UPDATE: "Dick" squeaks out on climate research funding:

"The president was straightforward. We're not spending money on that anymore," he huffed. "We think that's a waste of your money to do that."  (our emphasis)

[must fight urge to punch]