Trump's First Budget

A Look at Trump’s Budget
The View from the Middle

While the lame stream media and the Democrat Party chase their “Russian collusion” tails and report one conspiracy theory after another that dominates nightly news coverage, I thought I would cover something of real importance, which has received about 15 seconds of collective coverage since it was released. Trump’s budget, which has been all but ignored by the media reveals much about Trump’s intentions, like them or not, for the country. And, I thought the best way to dramatize his new direction is to compare Trump’s budget to Barack Obama’s last budget.
Barack Obama’s budget increased government spending by 55% over 10 years from $4.1 trillion annually to $6.5 trillion. Total government spending over those 10 years was proposed to be $52.6 trillion. And Obama’s budget never balanced. In fact, annual deficits were proposed to increase every year after 2020 climaxing at almost $800 billion in 2026. In total, Barack Obama was planning to add $6.1 trillion to our debt and bring the total to just over $26 trillion in 2026. Remember, we are spending our children’s future as we accumulate this massive debt.
By comparison, Trump’s budget proposed only a 39% increase in annual government spending starting with $4.1 trillion in spending in 2018 and ending with only $5.7 trillion in 2027. That’s still a lot of money, but it is almost four trillion less than Obama’s ten year plan. And Trump’s budget actually does balance in ten years as annual deficits move from $440 billion in 2018 to a surplus of $16 billion in 2027. Again, that is still too much spending for my comfort, but it will reduce the proposed debt burden on our children by almost three trillion dollars compared to the Obama budget.
So, how does Trump propose to do this? First, he proposes to increase mandatory spending on things like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by only 55% over those 10 years while Obama’s budget proposed a 66% increase over 10 years. The big question that the lame stream media is not asking is, “how does he plan to do that?” Is he going to “means-test” Social Security? Are reductions in Medicare and Medicaid reasonable? We don’t know because the lame stream media is too busy slurping their Russian vodka as they drool over their next collusion conspiracy theory.
Another component of Trump’s balance budget plan comes from an actual reduction in discretionary spending. Obama’s proposal increased annual discretionary spending by 9% over 10 years. Donald Trump plans to actually reduce that annual expenditure by almost 8%. And that all comes from non-defense spending like training, salaries and foreign aid since he proposes a modest increase in military spending.
Finally, Trump also plans to take in fewer receipts (taxes) over this ten year period and he suggests that our economy will grow slightly faster than the Obama proposal, so the American people seem to be much more well off.
There are legitimate questions that our lame stream media could be asking about Trump’s budget, but they aren’t. Directionally, as you might imagine, I am in favor of Trump’s budget. I prefer a smaller, less invasive, more efficient federal government and Trump’s proposal delivers that. Now if the media could get its collective heads out of its collective orifices we might learn a little more about how Trump plans to deliver this budget. Maybe the media and the Democrats are afraid that the answers might actually make too much sense.