By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – The thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people that add up to the pile of White House budget proposals released Monday – if anyone actually printed them out – should count for something and so reporters write about them, talk about them and note that this is an exercise every year that doesn’t have much to do with actual government policy.
The budget that becomes law is eventually worked out often after the next budget year is already under way and usually bears hardly any resemblance to what the White House proposes, particularly when one House of Congress is in the hands of the party opposite to that of the president.
That said, it takes some splitting the difference to get an even approximate picture of what’s at stake.
Here’s the Acting Budget Director Russ Vought allowing a little bit of questioning from reporters at the White House Monday in one of those rare press-room briefings and afterward to a TV audience:
“There’s about 5% reduction to non-defense discretionary spending but this will be in many different areas, although there will be some increases with regard to NASA, they’ll be some increases to Department of Homeland Security, a 21% cut to foreign aid.”
As usual for budget directors, he picked out some examples of foreign aid spending he hoped would seem to be ridiculous. “We believe it’s time to get out of funding the Bob Dylan Museum, the Bob Dylan statue in Mozambique or the professional cricket league in Afghanistan or the NASA space camp in Pakistan,” he said.
OK, let’s switch lenses and see the picture through the eyes of Democrats, in this case, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. John Yarmouth:
“This is the future President Trump envisions for our nation: one where the federal government relinquishes any responsibility for the well-being of the American people and our nation. What the President has put forth is a destructive and irrational budget that intentionally goes after working families and vulnerable Americans.”
Back to Vought. Proposing another $741 billion for the Pentagon makes Trump look like he’s itching for combat?
“I don’t think anybody could accuse this President of a warmongering,” said the man who’s running the Office of Management and Budget while Mick Mulvaney continues as White House chief of staff.
“He’s had a commitment to reducing our commitments overseas and getting out of the business of endless wars, Vought continued. “But look, this president believes that we need to have a strong national defense and this provides another historic level of defense spending, $741 billion dollars building off of the three previous years that were all north of 700 billion dollars.”
And now back to the Democratic opposition: “A half a trillion-dollar cut to Medicare. A roughly $900 billion cut to Medicaid. A $24 billion cut to Social Security. Gutting nutrition assistance by $182 billion. A 21% cut to foreign aid and diplomatic efforts. Debilitating attacks to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Destructive cuts to our public schools and programs that help Americans earn a college education.”
Didn’t the president promise to protect Medicare and Medicaid?
“Medicare will grow at 6% under this budget. The budget does propose good government reforms to lower drug prices,” Vought said.
Didn’t the president say he can achieve 3% and 4% and 5% growth?
“The economic assumption for this year is 2.8% so we don’t feel like we’re going to be able to get up to 3%,” Vought said, “but we do think we’ll be on the other side of things like the GM strike … hopefully on the other side at some point of the Boeing situation and our view is at this point corona virus is not something that’s going to have ripple effects.”
Had enough? You don’t want to hear about the big increase proposed to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons? Or hear Democrats say Trump is breaking his promises, has defaulted on the bipartisan budget deal, has a warped vision of the future?
The bigger picture as sketched by nonpartisan widely acknowledged budget experts is that any wiggle room Congress and the White House think they may have in rearranging the segments of government spending is fast running out because every bit of spare change will be eaten up by debt service on accumulated trillion dollar annual deficits – in less than another decade.
The White House and the Congressional Budget Office views diverge sharply the further into the future they look. In eight or nine years someone will have been forced to do something about it or the country descends into a debt-constrained, low energy economy that will no longer support all the borrowing or spending..
Yet the nation’s policymakers of both parties are still in the “not yet” years, when the future can still seem fuzzy enough to allow the kind of benign outcomes that the dispassionate experts say are even now no longer possible.
Austerity replaces prosperity little by little, unless the economy somehow enjoys the benefit of higher productivity growth, an influx of additional workers or both. If capital investment never rebounds and constant dysfunction in Washington causes widespread loss of confidence the deterioration happens even faster and goes deeper.
Meanwhile, let’s argue some more about wish lists and guns vs. butter priorities, not dire probabilities.