Six on "our" Economy: White House’s New Budget Exposes Donald Trump’s Lies About Protecting Medicare and Medicaid; Lobbying
panaritisp
"I've noted before that Donald Trump lives by a famous dictum from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist: “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.” (Goebbels attributed this tactic to the English.) And the President has outdone himself with his Administration’s new budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, which is entitled “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.”
“Promises kept” has a particularly nice ring to it. Almost as nice as what Trump said on that fateful day, June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower. “Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts,” he declared. “Have to do it.” Throughout the Republican primary campaign, Trump repeated this pledge many times and also accused his G.O.P. opponents of wanting to slash the three big entitlement programs. In the general-election campaign, he stuck to the same mantra. A few days before Election Day, he suggested that Hillary Clinton wanted to “destroy” Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, which she had vowed to expand, and claimed that he alone would “protect” it.
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So how does the “Budget for a Better America” treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump’s campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money."
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FAIR: Bloomberg’s Armsmaker-Funded Columnist Wants You to Know: Military Spending Is Woke
"You may not know it, but bloated Pentagon budgets are actually “progressive.” Or so says a recent opinion piece in Bloomberg News (3/17/19), “Progressives Should Learn to Love the Pentagon Budget,” by Hal Brands.
Bloomberg identifies Brands as the “Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.” “Kissinger” is ominous enough, but surely Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is some innocuous, wonky academic institution, no?
In a piece explicitly defending bloated military budgets, however, perhaps it would be useful to know what exactly the “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments” is. We can start by reading this section taken directly from their website (unabridged): ... "
"Like many of the city’s EMTs and paramedics, union leaders say, the single mother relied on extra shifts to support her five children.
And Arroyo’s death could have meant financial ruin for her family — since EMS workers at that time were not guaranteed automatic line-of-duty death benefits on par with other uniformed first responders like firefighters and cops.
In the wake of her tragic loss, the city’s EMS unions successfully pushed the state Legislature to pass a law extending the same benefit to emergency medical technicians and paramedics, rather than leaving it up to mayoral discretion.Like many of the city’s EMTs and paramedics, union leaders say, the single mother relied on extra shifts to support her five children.
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