Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 26
Trump’s budget is a fantasy built on a house of cards
Where’s the real Paul Ryan when we need him? You know, that wonky digging-in-the-weeds guy who knew every budget forward and backward and upside down and inside out?
We ask because Ryan today is supporting a dream world fantasy of a Trump budget that purports to balance the budget in 10 years on a house of cards. (“What I see is a president keeping his promises,” Ryan told Fox News). Others aren’t as blind in their loyalty. Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain weren’t the only congressional leaders to call the budget “dead on arrival.”
In fact, “dead on arrival” is the best news we’ve heard about the Trump budget, which may be the least conservative in decades. If this were to somehow survive the sharp knives in Congress, the country would be in real trouble with millions left without services they need, a weaker defense and a massively growing deficit.
First, the numbers are literally unbelievable.
Among the problems: Critics say the budget double counts its tax cuts and includes revenue from an estate tax that it would eliminate, reports Business Insider. It also projects a 3% growth in the economy that virtually no one believes can happen. And it includes basic errors that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said in the Washington Post “would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.”
While giving the president points for setting a good fiscal goal, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in a release that the budget is “based on overly optimistic economic projections” and that the president is “relying on phony growth and unachievable cuts.”
As to allocating spending, the budget increases defense spending but in the wrong way: The National Interest reports that the budget “begins to repair - but does not rebuild - the U.S. military,” and “does not live up to congressional expectations to better align resources with strategy after years of a growing mismatch.”
At the same time, social programs are being gutted, which should worry states. Medicaid would take a $600 billion hit on top of the cuts proposed in the American Health Care Act, leaving states “looking at a more than $1 trillion reduction in Medicaid spending” Governing magazine reports.
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement that the federal cuts in health spending “would be catastrophic, especially for our most vulnerable, including children, seniors and low-income Americans.”
Environmental protection is being tossed out the window with severe cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. Among the casualties close to home is the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, designed to restore that vital national resource, and cleanup efforts in the Fox River. Eliminating the initiative breaks a promise, no surprise here, that Trump made on the campaign trail to work with Congress to protect the lakes. Instead, he’s tossing the job to the states, which can’t afford it.
Ryan has in the past offered scathing criticism of Democratic budgets, including those of Barack Obama, and he was right to do so. But the Trump budget blows them all out of the water. Ryan needs to take off his political blinders and join those who are taking a realistic look at Trump’s nonsensical budget and saying “dead in the water.”
___
Wisconsin State Journal, May 28
Yes, please, keep the state budget clean
The leaders of the Legislature’s finance committee say they want a clean state budget.
So do we.
So should all Wisconsin citizens who value an open and careful process for spending $76 billion of taxpayer money.
Joint Finance Committee leaders Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, and Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, said last week they hope to avoid any last-minute surprises while wrapping up work on the state budget in the coming weeks. Specifically, they said their committee is trying to avoid the introduction of what’s known as a 999 budget motion.
Good. And instead of just trying, they should make absolutely sure that a bunch of non-fiscal policy isn’t slipped into the budget at the last minute to avoid public scrutiny and input.
Nygren, Darling and their budget committee last month impressively purged all 83 policy proposals from Gov. Scott Walker’s two-year state spending plan. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau had identified the items as having little or nothing to do with spending money.
The governor had included language in his budget that would have allowed local governments to bury meeting minutes and other public notices on obscure government websites, rather than in newspapers and on a searchable website where people would actually see the information. The governor’s budget also sought to make Wisconsin the only state without a minimum number of hours required for educating children. And he tried to eliminate several boards while making significant changes to the private school voucher program.
If those are such good ideas, surely they can withstand the scrutiny of public hearings and specific votes as separate pieces of legislation. They shouldn’t be hidden in a massive state spending plan.
To its credit, the Joint Finance Committee became the first budget panel in more than a decade to remove all non-fiscal policy from a governor’s budget last month. Now the challenge is to keep the policy out as lawmakers wrap up their amendments.
The last thing lawmakers and their constituents need is a repeat of two years ago, when the Joint Finance Committee stuffed dozens of policy changes into the budget on the eve of the July 4 weekend, hoping to dodge attention.
Instead, the sneaky maneuver triggered tremendous public backlash because it included language that would have decimated Wisconsin’s open records law. The committee quickly reversed course, with some members apologizing.
Nygren and Darling last week were saying all of the right things about avoiding a repeat of that fiasco.
We hope the committee has learned its lesson and understands the public wants a clean budget without controversial policy that has no fiscal effect.
___
Beloit Daily News, May 26
Dead on arrival? Yes, but read on
President Donald Trump’s budget is being called dead on arrival by members of Congress from both political parties.
Let’s put that in perspective.
President Barack Obama couldn’t get a budget through Congress, either, and routinely received just as much opposition from his own fellow Democrats as he did from Republicans. Moral of the story: Congress is out to lunch when it comes to making the tough choices necessary for any budget. Instead, Congress just keeps passing what is known as continuing resolutions, funding the government a few months (or, sometimes, weeks) at a time. That’s why Americans keep hearing all this regular nonsense about “shutting down the government.” It’s the sword Congress holds over its own head to remind members they must do something or the government runs out of money.
This time around, though, it’s a bit different. And we give Trump some credit for that.
Yes, the budget submitted by the Trump administration is an outlier and, without a doubt, Congress will drop it in the trash.
That doesn’t mean the budget has no value as an instructional tool.
It takes certain promises Trump made - a big bump in defense spending, for example - and tries to plug that in by offsetting costs with cuts in other programs. Usually, the federal flimflammers won’t do that. They just juggle numbers and massage projections to suggest citizens can have everything they want and the money will just magically appear.
News flash: It doesn’t. That’s why the annual budget deficit and the overall national debt continue to explode. You can’t spend more money than you have without borrowing enormous sums.
Nor, by the way, can you subtract from the revenue side of the ledger with tax cuts while continuing to spend more without blowing up the deficit.
So Trump’s budget proposes eye-popping cuts to domestic programs ranging from Medicaid to food stamps to block grants to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes for Health. Enacting anything resembling that budget would bring out the pitchforks and torches among the people.
So, let’s consider this an object lesson in reality.
Why is it that federal budgets for decades have funded more programs than tax revenues can support?
Answer: Because the American people want the benefits without the inconvenience of paying for it.
They want rich people to pay for benefits for everybody else.
Not surprisingly, rich people object.
Members of Congress - ever mindful of trying to keep everybody happy in order to win re-election - came up with this solution: Borrow trillions to give people the benefits they want, and cut taxes so people with lots of money are happy about it. The bill will come due, and the rickety financial house will fall, but probably not for years - so why worry now?
At least the Trump budget presents an apocalyptic picture of reality that comes into focus when one begins to realize people can’t always have what they want if they are not willing to pay for it.
What that means is a culprit contributing to the federal budget mess is the guy staring back at you in the mirror. Americans have come to believe the government ought to be the go-to place for solving every societal problem. Eager-to-please politicians on the campaign trail are always happy to agree. In the process, our wants have exceeded our means.
We don’t want to accept that, either, so we howl in unison at any budget plan that fails to deliver.
Each year the hole gets deeper.
One day, it will cave in.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.