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“In the near future I want to do what has not been done in 24 years — balance the federal budget, we’re gonna balance it,” Trump declaimed in his speech before a joint session of Congress last week.
Trump is obviously lying, as his spending and revenue proposals do not suggest he’s even attempting to make a good faith effort to balance the budget. Nor is this new. Republicans have for decades — at least since Reagan — mounted up massive deficits while claiming to put forward responsible budgets.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein refers to this as the GOP war on budgeting. Trump is expanding that war in an especially shameless fashion. Not only is he lying about his desire to cut deficits, he’s also obfuscating about his spending priorities and preferences — especially as they relate to Social Security and Medicaid.
The result is budgeting as Big Lie, as Republicans immiserate the public, give massive handouts to billionaires, jack up enormous deficits, and then pretend to be the party of compassion and fiscal responsibility.
Trump’s economic plans are incoherent and incomprehensible at least partially by design. The goal, by this longtime scam artist, is to bamboozle the American people and take their money.
Insulting your intelligence
Trump has said so much nonsense about the budget and priorities that it’s difficult to summarize. But the central contradiction is that he has said he wants to do three incompatible things:
1. Balance the budget
2. Extend the tax cuts from his first term
3. Keep Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid fully funded
Doing all these simply isn’t possible. You can’t slash revenue by trillions, refuse to cut the biggest items in the budget, and eliminate the deficit. The numbers simply don’t add up.
Trump himself has tacitly admitted that his stated priorities are mutually contradictory. He’s endorsed the House budget framework, which extends his first term tax cuts. That plan raises the deficit by $2.8 trillion through 2034. In contrast, the Senate has proposed a balanced bill, putting votes on extending the tax cuts off until later. But, again, Trump prefers the House bill.
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The unbalanced, budget-busting House budget proposal relies on making massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, or both. It instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to make $880 billion in cuts. But as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office points out, if you exclude Medicare and Medicaid, the Energy and Commerce Committee only has jurisdiction over $581 billion. As a basic matter of math, $581 billion is $299 billion short of $880 billion. The numbers literally don’t add up.
House speaker and smug hypocrite Mike Johnson has claimed that the House can find major savings by getting rid of “fraud, waste, and abuse” in Medicaid.
This is standard Republican rhetoric and as you won’t be surprised to learn, it’s hooey. There’s no evidence of massive systemic waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid. Republicans themselves know this, which is why GOP members are nervous about voting for the budget, and why Republican Nevada Gov. Joseph Lombardo issued a statement late last month warning that “proposed reductions would put lives at risk.”
The war on budgeting
It’s worth taking a minute here to note that the general bipartisan inside-the-Beltway insistence on balanced budgets is largely misguided in the first place. The federal government can print money and borrow on the full faith and credit of the United States. It is not a household and does not have to balance budgets like a household.
Under Biden, for example, the US spent more than any other comparable country on covid relief. This did not destroy the US economy. On the contrary, the US substantially outperformed its peers in job creation and growth and had lower inflation as well.
Balanced budgets, then, are a very poor way to measure, or to achieve, economic health. Policymakers should see spending as an investment, not as waste. They should see taxation as a way to incentivize positive behavior and promote a more equitable society, not as picking people’s pockets.
Even within the context of the confused “balanced budget” Washington narrative, though, Republican dishonesty is impressive — and has been building through a remorseless decades-long war on budgeting.
As Bernstein explains, “Under war on budgeting thinking, each tax and each expenditure is evaluated in isolation as good or bad; there’s no sense that one needs to compare one expenditure to the other, or to revenues, in order to get the whole thing to balance.” For the GOP (and Trump), “balancing the budget” doesn’t mean getting expenditures and revenue to actually balance. It means eliminating taxes and spending they don’t like. The budget is “balanced” in the sense that it rewards billionaires and crushes the working class, since that’s what the GOP wants to do.
From the war on budgeting perspective, it makes perfect sense for Trump to prefer the House GOP budget to the Senate GOP version. Yes, the Senate GOP budget has balanced expenditures and revenue (at least until they pass Trump’s cherished tax cuts). But since a “balanced budget” actually just means a budget that does more of what the GOP wants, and since the main thing the GOP wants is massive tax cuts, Trump of course chooses the tax cut House plan — and then says it’s more balanced.
It all makes sense if you just change the meaning of “balanced budget” to suit your ideological preferences.
Trump turns the shamelessness up to 11
The traditional Republican war on budgeting has been bad enough. Trump, though, as is his wont, has added additional layers of lying, obfuscation, confusion, and constitutional crisis onto an already reprehensible framework.
This is most obvious in the case of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Like the name says, DOGE is presented as a way to cut government waste.
But, per the war on budgeting, “waste” here doesn’t mean, “money we can spend better to achieve the goals Congress established.” Instead, “waste” just means, “anything Elon Musk personally decides he doesn’t like.” And because Elon Musk is a hateful fool, those cuts have included massive, unconstitutional, illegal cuts to cancer and Alzheimer’s research, to global nutritional aid and healthcare, and to veteran’s healthcare.
Similarly, Trump has vowed to not cut Social Security — but at the same time in his speech last week he made wild, false accusations of fraud in Social Security. This is a familiar war on budgeting tactic — claim that spending you don’t like is wasteful or unnecessary and needs to be eliminated for budgetary reasons.
Paul Ryan’s 2010 budget, which proposed massive cuts to Social Security and Medicaid in the name of balanced budgets, while not balancing the budget, is a precedent. But Ryan still respected the constitutional order. He couldn’t get the votes to slash these popular programs, so he didn’t slash them.
In contrast, Musk and Trump are lying about their preferences, lying about their intentions, lying about waste and fraud, and claiming to protect Social Security even as they illegally gut it. Musk is already moving to slash thousands of jobs in the Social Security Administration. An ex-agency head said the government may fail to issue some Social Security checks to seniors who rely on them for the first time in history.
Chaos and oligarchy
The war on budgeting started because Republican priorities are deeply unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich polls extremely well; it has 79 percent support. By contrast, some 70 percent of Republicans view Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security favorably. Hardly anyone likes the idea of wealth transfers from the poor and working class to billionaires — except for billionaires. Republicans have reframed their agenda as fiscal responsibility because otherwise their agenda is transparently evil.
Trump has taken this core Republican lie and built from it a bizarre edifice of chaos, spite, and harm. Republican budgeting never made sense. Now the GOP’s fundamental dishonesty has been channeled into a vindictive assault on government workers and the American people led by the literal richest man on earth. The war on budgeting has become, inevitably, a war on us.
That’s it for today
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