Conservative fantasies are finally colliding with reality

Paul Krugman

This week the Trump administration put out a budget blueprint — or more accurately, a “budget” blueprint. After all, real budgets detail where the money comes from and where it goes; this proclamation covers only around a third of federal spending, while saying nothing about revenues or projected deficits.

As the fiscal expert Stan Collender put it: “This is not a budget. It’s a Trump campaign press release masquerading as a government document.”

The administration presumably hopes it will distract the public and the press from the health care debacle. But in any case, this pseudo-budget has the same combination of mean-spiritedness and fiscal fantasy that has turned the GOP effort to replace Obamacare into a train wreck.

Consider the vision of government and its role that the right has peddled for decades — that much if not most government spending is a waste, doing nobody any good. And to the extent to which spending does help anyone, it’s Those People — lazy, undeserving types who happen to be a bit, well, dark- er than Real Americans.

This was the kind of “thinking” that underlay President Trump’s promise to replace Obamacare with something “far less expensive and far better.” After all, it’s a government program, so he assumed that it must be full of waste that a tough leader like him could eliminate.

Strange to say, however, Republicans turn out to have no ideas about how to make the program cheaper other than eliminating health insurance for 24 million people (and making coverage worse, with higher out-of-pocket costs for those who remain).

Basically the same story applies at a broader level. Consider federal spending as a whole: Outside defense it’s dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — programs crucial to tens of millions of Americans, many of them the white working-class core of Trump support. Furthermore, most other government spending also serves purposes that are popular, important or (usually) both.

So many opposed to “big government”? Many have a distorted view of the numbers. For example, people have a vastly exaggerated view of how much we spend on foreign aid. Many also fail to connect their own experience with public policy: Lots of Social Security and Medicare recipients believe they make no use of any government social program.

Thanks to these misperceptions, nurtured by right-wing media, poli- ticians run on promises of drastic spending cuts: Many, perhaps most voters don’t see how that would affect their lives.

But what will happen if anti-big-government politicians find themselves in a position to put their agenda into practice? Voters will quickly get a lesson in what slashing spending really means — and they won’t be happy.

That’s the wall Obamacare repeal just smashed into. And the same will happen if this whatever-itis turns into a real budget.

Mr. Trump himself gives every indication of having no idea what the federal government does; his vaguely budgetlike document isn’t much more than a roughly scribbled list of numbers. But the reality is that the proposed cuts would have ugly, highly visible effects.

Republicans’ budget promises, like their health care promises, have been based on an essentially fraudulent picture of what’s really going on. And now the bill for these lies is coming due.