Dems tee off on Trump budget
House Democrats wasted no time Monday ripping apart President Trump’s latest budget proposal, warning that the White House’s 2019 spending blueprint would decimate federal programs at the expense of the vulnerable populations they’re designed to serve.
“There is a very irresponsible and unrealistic perspective on what we need to do as a government to invest in the future of the economy and the future of our citizens,” Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told reporters Monday afternoon in the Capitol.
Yarmuth, joining other Democratic leaders, said the domestic cuts proposed by Trump’s budget — which would affect virtually every federal agency in Washington — are the inevitable result of the Republicans’ newly enacted tax cuts, which are expected to reduce federal revenue by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade.
That “starve-the-beast” strategy, Yarmuth charged, was part of the Republicans’ design in passing the tax overhaul to begin with.
“This budget is a very vivid admission that the tax bill is truly the scam that we talked about last year, in the sense that the budget admits that it won’t pay for itself,” he said.
“Clearly, with an addition of $7 trillion to the debt under this budget, the motivation is even stronger for the administration to push cuts in programs that serve many Americans and much of the vulnerable population of the country, which is what we predicted would happen last fall,” Yarmuth said.
Trump’s blueprint, like other presidential budgets of the modern era, is sure to be dead-on-arrival in Congress. This is especially true this year, since the new White House plan rejects parts of the sweeping two-year budget deal Congress passed — and Trump signed into law — just last week.
But the document provides both parties a messaging tool with which to carve distinctions between their priorities.
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/373512-dems-tee-off-on-trump-budget
