Sorry, suckers: Trump is perfectly happy to help Paul Ryan shred the safety net

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Sorry, suckers: Trump is perfectly happy to help Paul Ryan shred the safety net

By Paul Waldman May 22 at 12:51 PM

The White House will be releasing the president’s budget tomorrow, and it’s going to be brutal:

President Trump’s first major budget proposal on Tuesday will include massive cuts to Medicaid and call for changes to anti-poverty programs that would give states new power to limit a range of benefits, people familiar with the planning said, despite growing unease in Congress about cutting the safety net.

For Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides health care to low-income Americans, Trump’s budget plan would follow through on a bill passed by House Republicans to cut more than $800 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this could cut off Medicaid benefits for about 10 million people over the next decade.

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During the 2016 campaign, Trump unsettled some Republicans by saying repeatedly that he wouldn’t cut Social Security or Medicare. He even promised on occasion not to cut Medicaid either. When you put that together with some of his populist rhetoric, it was natural to assume that once he and the Republican Congress had to agree on a budget, the negotiation would involve Congress hoping for deep cuts to social programs, Trump resisting at least some of those cuts and them arriving at some kind of compromise in the middle.

But it has become obvious that Trump’s words about protecting programs like Medicaid were not “positions” in the sense of being a stance he took based on something he believed. They were passing impulses, probably based on his reading of whoever was in the room with him at a particular moment. Once they escaped his mouth and faded into the ether, they exercised no more hold on him than a promise to release his tax returns or make Mexico pay for a border wall. If they were things Trump genuinely believed in, the White House staffers who wrote his budget would know they’d have to take them into account. But they didn’t.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/05/22/sorry-suckers-trump-is-perfectly-happy-to-help-paul-ryan-shred-the-safety-net/

[beachbum bob]

1. Conservative misconceptions concerning govt programs are taken advantage of by

A greater portion of minorities than whites...when the majority of aid goes to poor whites who vote largely for republicans....so karma again...