A slash-and-burn budget

Campaigning for President, Donald Trump repeatedly proclaimed the economy to be rigged by the powerful and well-connected against the little guy. As President, Trump has delivered a federal budget that slashes every imaginable form of assistance for said little guy, even as it delivers billions of new dollars spent on the military and border protection, not to mention huge tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthy.

Trump’s trick is to project, based more on faith than any responsible economic expectation, that those reductions in corporate and income tax rates, inheritance taxes and more will unleash growth unseen in a generation.

And so, abracadabra, kalamazoo, $2 trillion will get socked away in the bank — funds that Trump and budget director Mick Mulvaney are simultaneously accounting as paying for those tax cuts. What’s a few trillion dollars in fantastical, double-counted revenue between friends?

It takes creativity and dedication to produce a budget simultaneously this stingy and this preposterous. The plan even includes $1.6 billion for the border wall Trump promised, and promised, and promised again that Mexico would pay for.

The Republican-dominated House, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, can be expected to lap this poison up. The more sensible Senate must bring sensitivity to its review — without losing a few good ideas buried in a big pile of bad.

While broad contours were clear by March, the gory details of Trump’s $3.6 trillion in anticipated spending cuts still shock.

Making good on his promise not to touch Social Security retirement benefits or Medicare, and boosting piles of cash for national defense, Trump would savage other federal programs, the vast majority of them designed to help the needy.

To wit:

A 68% cut to public housing repair funds, abandoning aging projects to crumble onto their tenants, socking New York City alone with $300 million in cuts. To live in such palaces, tenants would have to commit an intolerable 35% of their incomes, up from 30%.

A $610 billion reduction to Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled, asking states to “refocus their Medicaid programs on the most vulnerable” and put recipients to work. (Guess what: most already do.)

A $191 billion reduction over 10 years to food stamps, achieved by requiring cash-strapped states to pitch in 25 cents out of every dollar. Welfare cash benefits would shrink by $16 billion.

Death to the Legal Services Corp., which funds lawyers so poor people can exercise their constitutional right to counsel. Death too to block grants that enable New York City to keep apartments from turning to slums.

Trump shrugs that states and cities should shoulder the spending load if they’d like — while he slashes corporate taxes and eliminates the tax that multi-millionaires pay on the money they pass on to their children.

Not all that glitters is fool’s gold. Trump wants to provide paid parental leave of six weeks for new mothers and fathers, to be funded through unemployment insurance programs. A step forward.

And Trump properly promises tough love for the ablest recipients of Social Security Disability, where rolls have swelled with recipients on employment’s margins who could conceivably work.

And for heaven’s sake already, bring on the $200 billion down payment for the President’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

But what a shame that Trump’s bridge to his great-again America teeters on the cruelest cuts.