Donald Trump's budget proves that GOP deficit hawks are an endangered breed

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According to Trump's plan, the national debt is expected to increase by 40% over the next 10 years, from $ 22 trillion to $ 31 trillion. The budget ends up balancing, but only after 15 years and relying on unlikely levels of economic growth and acting against federal agencies with cuts of $ 2.7 trillion during the next decade. The White House budget also calls for a 5% increase in the Pentagon's budget and tries very little to reform major rights spending programs.

Only a few years ago, and with the name of Barack Obama on the front page, a budget like the White House would have turned the heads of Republicans in Washington. For almost ten years, Colombian government lawmakers have warned of the dangers of a growing deficit and public debt. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 by surfing on a wave of the Tea Party fueled by voter anger over the financial crisis and their obsession with limiting what they saw as uncontrollable government spending.

Nearly ten years later, this White House budget is as clear a sign as anyone who claims that Republican budget hawks are endangered and that, under President Donald Trump, the GOP has lost all of its dynamism in budgetary discipline.

During the Obama era, Paul Ryan spent years presenting meager budgets, reforming rights, to the House, knowing that they would not go anywhere with Democrats controlling the Senate and the Senate. White House. Nevertheless, it was a political decision to prioritize that the Republicans would likely adopt if they ever gained full control of Washington. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican Republican Lawyer and South Carolina State Law Enforcement, is one of the most prominent Tea Party curators.

The culmination of the GOP's cumbersome budget came in 2011, when Republicans in the House pushed Obama to sign the Budget Control Act, which raised the US government's debt limit in exchange for a reduction. significant deficit. These cuts eventually resulted in widespread sequestration of most mandatory and discretionary spending. This satisfied some budget hawks, but the blind cuts ignored the real drivers of the long-run deficit: the expenditure of rights.

What a difference a few years make. Ryan left Congress, budget deficits continued to skyrocket and Mulvaney is now working for Trump as a budget director and acting chief of staff. The appointment of Mulvaney as Trump's director of CAMO in 2017 had given some GOP senators hope that the president would perhaps be more hawkish about deficit, despite some speeches from his campaign going in the opposite direction. But it seems more than Trump changed Mulvaney that the opposite.

Mulvaney was intimately involved in developing the White House's annual budget proposals, but during the first two years of Trump's presidency neither of the two budgets genuinely dealt with pension rights expenditures. After years of Republicans accusing Democrats of impeding Medicare reform, Mulvaney admitted last year that the problem was returning to his new boss. "The president was not willing, because of the promises he made during the election campaign, to manage these programs," Mulvaney told reporters at the presentation of the draft budget in February 2018. .

Rather than fight, Mulvaney aligned himself with the new Republican party spending a deficit, perhaps realizing that the fighting was in vain. "I have been here for six and a half years, and seven years now, and I realized that we will never balance the budget based solely on spending cuts," Mulvaney told Yahoo Finance in a statement. October 2017. "We are not going to cut our way to balance." The attitude just does not exist for that on Capitol Hill. "

Mulvaney joined the Republican pressure group saying economic growth will help boost incomes and reduce budget deficits. "The US's booming economy will generate an increase in government revenue – an important step towards long-term fiscal sustainability," he said in a statement last October after announcing that the deficit had increased by 17% in 2018 compared to the previous year.

Just a mission statement

The White House budget proposals are rarely worth the paper they are printed on, they serve more mission statements or press releases than serious budget documents. This is especially true when the opposition party has some power, as the Democrats know, with the control of the House. The best opportunity for a president to influence the budget most directly is when his party controls Congress, but these windows have not been open for a long time in recent administrations. Obama was two years old with a unified democratic government before the Republicans took power in the House and began to resist his spending priorities. Fiscal policy in Washington has not been normal since.

Like his predecessor, Trump also had two years with a Republican Congress. The possibility of reducing deficits has come forward, but with a president not very interested in deficits and Republican voters focused on immigration and health care, the GOP has spent its political capital in reducing the number of people in the country. 39, tax of 2,300 billion dollars.

Even if Trump had been willing to reform old age benefit programs, that possibility died when the Democrats reconquered the House. Now, Trump has the same problem as Obama, but with a new dynamic: unlike Republican rhetoric, Democrats do not oppose government spending and will not be incentivized to consider the significant cuts proposed by Trump . This means that spending will likely continue to increase, tax cuts will remain in place and rights will not be affected. In this world, the deficit continues to grow.

Grow our way

Of course, that's not the way the White House does it. At the Monday 2020 budget press conference, Russell Vought, acting director of the OMB, echoed confidence in growth as a solution to the deficit. "We are confident that the President's historic tax reforms, deregulation and trade policy freeing up US energy will continue our economic growth.The economic policies of this budget will generate more than enough revenue to support the costs of reducing energy costs." Tax, "said Vought.

Nevertheless, it seems that the economic boom on which the administration counts could slow down. A recent survey of companies suggested that the impact of tax cuts on job growth was illusory, and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell suggested that growth late last year could be "slowing down". Economic growth rose from 4.2% in the second quarter of 2018 to 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2018, which is about the same as GDP growth a year earlier.

The new White House budget proposes changes to Medicare that cut spending by $ 845 billion over the next 10 years, less than 15% of what the program is expected to spend over the next 10 years. this period. But Vought clearly explained the position of the administration on the fundamental reforms of the program.

"Medicare spending will grow every year by good margins and there will be no structural change for Medicare," said Vought, who also blamed Congress for not curbing discretionary spending in recent years – a moment, it should be noted, directed on Capitol Hill.

Yuval Levin, editor-in-chief of the National Affairs political journal and long-time advocate of rights reform, praised the White House's actions to change the health care system. "These are fairly standard presidential budget proposals of the type that you would see from a president of one or the other party at this point," Levin told CNN. "They have proved politically unfeasible for a long time, but it's still good to see the administration fix a marker that it cares about containing the costs of these programs."

But as Republicans have shown throughout the Obama years, talking about reducing the deficit is inexpensive. Subsequently, however, orders a price that Washington is still not ready to pay.

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