What's Worse-- Biden's Sincere Belief In Austerity Or Trump's Belief In Nothing But Personal Corruption?

Trump's a monster, no doubt about it. He's a grifter who has not an ounce of patriotism nor the will towards public service in his bloated orange body or his misshapen shriveled soul. That said, unlike Joe Biden, Trump is not driven-- the way his party is-- to destroy Social Security and Medicare. And it isn't just the Republican Party that is eager to destroy the social safety net; it is also the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, faction of the party that has largely rallied behind Biden, one of the worst pro-Austerity warriors in our lifetimes, worse on that count than Trump, who doesn't care enough about it to want to stir up the ultimate hornets nest.

Over the weekend, Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein and Erica Werner looked at how Trump's proposed budget "is expected to lay bare how much he has adjusted to the political and practical limits of Washington, with some of his biggest campaign promises from 2016 cast aside and replaced with more limited policy ambitions. On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago."

Those advising Trump are as eager to cut Social Security and Medicare as Biden and his faction are. If Trump was interested in issues beyond his own prospects of emptying the treasury into his own pockets, he might be as bad, or even worse, than Biden on the social safety net. So far, though, he has only let the Austerity hawks chip away around the edges. His campaign promises to protect Medicaid from cuts, wrote Stein and Werner have "been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal 'will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.' He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign. He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions."

Biden, who has advocated deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for his entire career, would be much less likely to beat around the bush. Trump is reticent because of the political blowback. Biden would ignore the blowback and see himself as the ultimate political martyr who only has one term anyway. He sees Austerity as an ultimate good. Trump only sees graft and corruption as ultimate goods.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to deliver a major infrastructure plan, but there has been virtually no progress on this issue.

And the president’s promise to eliminate the government’s roughly $20 trillion debt within eight years has also gone unfulfilled. Instead, Trump has added almost $3 trillion to the debt in three years, and that number is only expected to balloon, according to nonpartisan estimates. Proposals to cut domestic programs have evaporated in massive year-end budget deals with Congress that have actually raised spending limits.

Trump’s first budget proposal relied on questionable math when it sought to eliminate the budget deficit after 10 years, but even that goal has slipped out of reach.

Trump has scored a string of victories in recent months, including securing a bipartisan revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement and being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate on impeachment charges. He signed a partial trade deal with China and marshaled through a massive tax-cut package in 2017.

But Monday’s budget proposal will demonstrate that a number of the president’s loftiest campaign promises from four years ago have largely been abandoned, because of political realities as well as simple budget math.

“I have no idea how he can live up to his campaign promises to reduce the deficit, not address entitlement programs, and at the same time cut taxes,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican who served as staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “I have not figured out how to square this circle, and neither have they.”

...[E]ven more so than under prior administrations, Trump’s budget proposals have been largely rejected by lawmakers who’ve agreed on a bipartisan basis to restore and even increase spending for agencies and programs that the administration has tried to cut, including health and education programs and foreign aid.

Trump in the past few years has sought to backpedal on some of the proposed budget cuts, facing blowback after seeking to cut funding in states central to his reelection campaign, such as Michigan.

That has led to some dejection among career officials at agencies and within the White House Office of Management and Budget, who are forced to devote enormous time and attention to developing a budget document they know Congress will largely reject, according to several people with knowledge of internal administration dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.

In prior years, Trump’s budgets have reflected the irreconcilable contradictions of his campaign promises in part by relying on overly rosy economic forecasts and glossing over how he would achieve big cuts.

In 2017, Trump’s budget predicted that economic growth would surge to an annual rate of 3 percent by 2021 and stay at that healthy rate indefinitely. This goal has proved elusive. The economy grew 2.9 percent in 2018 but slowed to 2.3 percent in 2019, and is projected to slow even more this year. Relying on rosy economic estimates in the budget plans allows the White House to assume that prospering families and companies will generate high levels of tax revenue as a way to offset the widening deficit. Instead, the deficit estimates have proved faulty.

Trump’s budgets have also proposed enormous cuts to domestic spending programs as a way to try to bring the deficit down. But nondefense domestic spending, aside from what are considered mandatory programs, makes up just a sliver of the overall $4.6 trillion federal budget. Mandatory programs, including the domestic programs Medicare and Social Security, make up more than 60 percent of federal spending. And since Trump has promised repeatedly to wall off Medicare and Social Security from cuts, while also increasing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security budgets, he has fewer agencies available for cuts if he wants to seek reductions.

Rep. Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (R-TN), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said the deficit cannot be addressed until Congress and the administration take on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But he noted that Trump has promised to protect those programs, “and I will certainly respect that.”

“So I think right now, this year, is probably not the year to deal with the mandatory side of the equation,” Fleischmann said. “But perhaps that’s something that President Trump will look at with the Congress in his second term.”

Ironically, Fleischmann's bloodthirsty instincts would undoubtably better-served by a Biden (or, likely, a Bloomberg) administration that would go right in for the kill. "Although," wrote Stein and Werner, "Trump has talked publicly about wanting to cut spending, he has also signaled an indifference toward the federal budget... [and] rarely speaks of it. Leaked audio from a dinner the president attended in January with donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, captured the president brushing aside those who are critical of rising defense and federal spending as part of the growing national debt. 'Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,' the president said."





Biden and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs, New Dems, so-called "Problem Solvers"-- care. Which is why the 2020 primary is the ultimate crossroads for the Democratic Party. Bernie wants to lead a party that embraces the philosophy of governance espoused by FDR. The B-Team embrace, albeit never openly, Rockefeller, Eisenhower and Nixon Republicanism.