Slate - "Trump's Budget Plan is Cruel and Reckless...just like his administration"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/03/16/donald_trump_s_pointless_budget_is_a_perfect_symbol_of_his_administration.html

Trump’s Budget Guts the EPA and Help for Poor Seniors. It’s a Perfect Symbol of His Administration.

By Jordan Weissmann

The budget plan that the Trump administration released Thursday is a sad, vicious, and mostly pointless document, the political and policy equivalent of shouting “America First!” to the wind while gunning your Dodge pickup into a lamppost. In order to fund a $54 billion increase in defense spending, it takes a machete to all manner of federal programs—aid for the poor and elderly, cancer research, public television, job training, and so forth. It gouges away 31 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's budget and 29 percent of the State Department's funding. This would all be horrifying, if it weren't already being written off by Republicans who will have the power to entirely ignore it.


“The administration’s budget isn’t going to be the budget,” said Sen. Marco Rubio. “We do the budget here. The administration makes recommendations, but Congress does budgets.”

Rubio is just stating a fact—Congress votes on appropriations. Presidential budgets, on the other hand, are mostly exercises in political messaging meant to outline the White House's priorities, which in the case of the current administration mostly entails bug-eyed nationalist posturing. The budget is literally titled “America First.” Wimpy liberal priorities like environmental protection and the arts get the ax. (It not only eliminates funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—Big Bird is in the crosshairs yet again—but also the endowments for the arts and humanities.) Money for international aid and diplomacy take a deadly cut in favor of more ships for the Navy and more soldiers in the Army and Marines.

“Make no mistake about it, this is a hard-power budget, not a soft-power budget,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, the man largely responsible for the document, said. “That is what the president wanted and that’s what we gave him.”

SNIP - much more to read at the above link

[gibraltar72]

1. Keeerist

These people are homicidal maniacs.

[blm]

2. The LORD OF THE FLIES Administration

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[NRaleighLiberal]

3. kicking for visibility