Talk about splitting hairs.
The White House has just released (hours after it was already leaked) its proposed budget for the next fiscal year. We know that it promised huge increases in defense spending, with matching huge cuts in domestic spending.
As in, $54 billion dollars worth of money going from domestic to military spending. That’s a lot.
The problem is that even with 10 percent cuts to every federal agency and all areas of domestic spending, it’s not clear that the plan would produce enough money for this gigantic increase in military spending.
But even thought they obviously need the money, the administration has made it absolutely clear that Social Security and Medicare will not be cut.
That is, they won’t be cut for now.
Donald Trump has promised since the primaries that he would not cut these key social support programs. He criticized his opponents for even considering making cuts.
I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2015
But that was then and this is now.
When you’re the President and you’ve spent months telling everybody that the U.S. is in extreme and constant danger from bad guys beyond our borders, you have to come up with the money to beef up your military.
When you’re the President and you really think it would be cool to have new warships and big shiny fighter jets, but you promised you’d build a “big, beautiful wall” between us and those scary brown Mexicans, you need to find the money to buy your new toys weapons.
And that’s why the White House is now insisting that it never meant it would really protect Medicare for our elderly or Social Security for our retired citizens. Oh, no. What Trump meant, his minions now say, is that he wouldn’t cut benefits for people who get them right this very minute.
He never said that he wouldn’t slice and dice these key programs sometime in the future. Like next year.
Or in May.
Donald Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, claimed that Trump was absolutely keeping his campaign promises. He said that because Trump’s first draft budget proposal…the one that adds tens of billions of dollars in cost…doesn’t address cuts to these two programs.
But he also said that the completed budget will be released in May. And that official budget might very well include (cough, cough) “entitlement reform.”
So.
If you have been paying into Social Security and Medicare for decades, and you’re hoping to retire soon, stay tuned. You might need to work an extra ten or twenty years to be able to afford your food and medicine.
You can hear candidate Trump making his empty promises right here.
Featured image via YouTube Screengrab.
