Ed Morrissey:
So far, the big takeaway from Donald Trump’s first weeks as president is that he intends to keep his promises. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to rebuild the military, cut federal spending, and stay far away from entitlement reform. The New York Times reports that his first budget delivers on all those promises, for better or worse:
President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a budget for the coming fiscal year that includes sharp increases in Defense Department spending and drastic enough cuts to domestic agencies that he can keep his promise to leave Social Security and Medicare alone, according to four senior administration officials.
As the Times’ reportorial team notes, a White House budget is almost entirely a political document. Congress creates budgets, not the White House, and the lawmakers can take the White House plan as much or as little into consideration while drafting it. Barack Obama’s budgets were dead on arrival on Capitol Hill after the 2010 midterms; Republicans routinely embarrassed Obama by holding floor votes on his budgets, which rarely garnered any Democratic votes.
That won’t happen with Trump while Republicans control Congress, of course, but that doesn’t mean that all of these cuts will make it through committee either. Nor does that appear to be the point of this budget. Tomorrow night, Trump will give his first address to a joint session of Congress, an unofficial State of the Union speech, as one is not required from a president until after his first year in office. Trump will emphasize his intent to honor campaign promises:
Mr. Trump’s top advisers huddled in the White House this weekend to work on his Tuesday night prime-time address. They focused on a single, often overlooked message amid the chaos of his first weeks in the White House: the assertion that the reality-show candidate is now a president determined to keep audacious campaign promises on immigration, the economy and the budget, no matter how sloppy or disruptive it looks from the outside.
“They might not agree with everything you do, but people will respect you for doing what you said you were going to do,” said Jason Miller, a top communications strategist on the Trump campaign who remains close to the White House.
“He’s doing something first, and there’s time for talk later,” Mr. Miller added. “This is ultimately how he’s going to get people who didn’t vote, or people who didn’t vote for him, into the fold. Inside the Beltway and with the media, there’s this focus on the palace intrigue. Out in the rest of the country, they are seeing a guy who is focused on jobs and the economy.”
News about government can be roughly divided into two categories: substance and process. Both matter for different reasons, but it’s fair to say that process stories matter a lot more inside the Beltway and with the media than outside of either. Personnel issues, White House Correspondents Dinners, and admission to gaggles and briefings are process stories that don’t matter a lot to those outside of the insiders. What matters to voters outside that bubble is substance — the actual policies, and the reality of having a president who works to keep campaign promises.
Team Trump understands that better than the media and Beltway do, at least in these first few weeks.
Better to spend on National Defense then on a bunch of whining little collage snowflakes they need to get off their fat little backsides and get a job instead of sitting on their fat little butt holes demanding a end the fracking make themselves useful for their families when they get married
From the NY Times article linked above:
Total federal expenditures for 2016 were $3.54 Trillion. A trillion is one thousand billion.
While Trump’s proposed EPA and State Department budget reductions hardly scratch the surface of the deficit problem, they will seriously damage the functioning of the two organizations in question. His action is politically motivated, not a remedy for fiscal imbalance. Military spending increases will likely wipe out even the symbolic savings.
Throw in the tax cuts he’s talking about on top of that, and then see what happens.
The guy is talking through his hat. There’s nothing here remotely resembling fiscal responsibility. He’s going to reverse the trend of declining annual deficits and once again accelerate the growth of the cumulative debt. Unlike Obama, he won’t even have inherited an epic economic catastrophe that sent federal revenues crashing through the floorboards to use as an excuse. At this point, much of what is about to happen could still be avoided.
Annual Deficits, on Obama’s Watch:
FY 2017 – $441 billion projected.
FY 2016 – $600 billion expected.
FY 2015 – $438 billion.
FY 2014 – $485 billion.
FY 2013 – $679 billion.
FY 2012 – $1.087 trillion.
FY 2011 – $1.300 trillion.
FY 2010 – $1.547 ($1.294 trillion plus $253 billion from the Obama Stimulus Act that was attached to the FY 2009 budget).
The EPA, doe, and most of the alphabet soup agencies are not in the Constitution. Do away with them. They are functions reserved to the states under the 10th amendment.
The Federal Aviation Administration isn’t in the Constitution, either. Do you think we don’t need the FAA?
This is not the 18th Century. The world is vastly more complex than it was when the Constitution was written. The document can’t be frozen in time. The world changes. When the Constitution was written slavery was a lawful institution, and it remained so for the better part of another century.
The Constitution is timeless, that is your problem, you do not understand that.