The wider Trump scandal is budget lies, not Russia

President Donald Trump’s budget demonstrates the costs of accepting lies as a normal currency in politics, broken promises as a customary way of doing business, false claims of being “populist” as the equivalent of the real thing, and sloppiness as what we should expect from government.

Trump’s fiscal plan was described as dead before arrival, but approaching it this way is a mistake. Many of the steep cuts in programs for low-income Americans mimic reductions passed before by Republicans in the House of Representatives. There’s more life in this document than the easy dismissals would suggest.

Particularly astounding from a president who promised better health care for Americans who can’t afford it is the $1.85

trillion reduction over a decade from Medicaid and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. But didn’t Trump promise not to cut Medicaid?

We demean ourselves if we cynically normalize the reality that every Trump promise is meaningless claptrap aimed at closing a deal — and that the vows will be forgotten even before the ink on the agreement is dry. Many who did business with Trump learned the hard way not to trust anything he said. His supporters are being forced to earn the same dreary wisdom.

Although fibbing with numbers is an old trick, how can you explain a budget that counts $2 trillion in claimed economic growth twice? It’s used once to “pay for” massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and another time to paint Trump’s budget as reaching balance in a decade.

This can’t just be careless math. Companies that make comparable errors in their prospectuses for public offerings can face legal action.

Another sign of fiscal fraud: the budget’s blithe assumption that we will hit 3 percent annual GDP growth over an extended period. That would be nice. But no respectable economic forecaster thinks this is credible.

But there are also philosophical lies, and these may be even more offensive. Trump and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney are selling this budget as good for hardworking taxpayers by claiming it would really only hurt moochers and layabouts. Thus did Mulvaney claim that a $192 billion reduction in food stamp spending over a decade was directed at “the folks who are on there who don’t want to work.”

Well, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported, it turns out that in food stamp households with at least one working-age, nondisabled adult, more than 80 percent work in the year before or after receiving benefits, and more than half work while getting them. This is a program aimed at easing the lives of the working poor.

And it is worth noting that in the five Rust Belt states that swung from Barack Obama to Trump, whites without a four-year college degree — the heart of the Trump constituency — “constitute most of those receiving assistance” from food stamps and the parts of Social Security that Trump would also slash. If Trump really wants people to go to work, how does he think taking money away from job training and college assistance will ease their path to self-sufficiency?

This is a man who sees his job as little more than spectacle, his word as negotiable and all numbers as fungible. The scandal of his presidency extends far beyond the Russia story.