Trump’s policy proposals would explode the deficit
The president’s policy priorities, touted Tuesday night in his wide-ranging first address to a joint session Congress, were quintessential Donald Trump, though with a softer tone: based on deception and impractical on many levels.
“Our military will be given the resources its brave warriors so richly deserve,” he said. “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our beautiful land.”
More money will be spent on a “great, great” border wall, drug treatment and child care. Corporations will receive a “big, big ” tax cut, and there will be “massive tax relief ” for the middle class.
It all sounded terrific, except for one thing: The numbers don’t add up.
Even before his speech, Trump’s plan to hike military spending by 10%, or $54 billion, next year — coupled with large offsetting cuts in diplomatic, environmental and other non-defense programs — was facing stern opposition on Capitol Hill. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., called it “dead on arrival.”
You simply can’t boost spending on the military that much, start a $1 trillion infrastructure program, hold Social Security and Medicare harmless, and slash taxes without exploding the deficit, which already exceeds $500 billion a year.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, seated behind Trump, and other congressional Republicans know this well. They understand that fiscal sanity depends on reining in the health and retirement programs that have swelled to nearly two-thirds of all federal spending.
Even if Congress and the president do nothing, spending on benefits is projected to rise from an already lofty $2.6 trillion this year to $3.3 trillion by the time the last budget of Trump’s first term rolls around in 2021.
To pretend that he’s doing something about red ink, Trump is targeting just one narrow band of spending: non-defense programs that have long been squeezed and can’t be cut much more without real damage.
To pay for the defense buildup, while exempting preferred areas such as highways and law enforcement, the administration is said to be weighing cuts of 25% at the Environmental Protection Agency and 37% for the State Department and foreign aid.
In reality, to balance the budget without touching defense or benefits, you’d have to eliminate virtually every non-defense, nonbenefit program, including transportation, housing, education, medical research and national parks.
Why would Trump, a business guy, traffic in budgetary irresponsibility? Perhaps, as the first president without government or military experience, he doesn’t yet have a good grasp on federal finances. More likely, his budgetary policies are designed to sound plausible to the uninitiated while allowing him to say he is fulfilling campaign promises. But he is not fulfilling anything until Congress actually passes legislation implementing his proposals.
If Trump plows ahead with those proposals, it will be up to Ryan, and the other Republicans who were applauding the president Tuesday night, to prevent him from plunging the nation into a major fiscal crisis.