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Trump budget slashes safety-net programs

While Mr Trump plans to boost military spending, he also wants to cut healthcare and food assistance programs for the poor in order to balance the budget.

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That assumption was savaged by economic experts.

Roth said the fiscal 2018 request is the middle step of a three-stage buildup that began with a $30 billion, fiscal 2017 budget amendment Congress cut by half.

“We finally have a president who’s willing to actually even balance the budget”, Ryan told reporters in the Capitol.

Trump’s budget relies on an optimistic projection of 3.0 percent economic growth in coming years, and assumes that the Trump tax overhaul, still in its infancy, will be deficit-neutral, Mulvaney said. The plan will have to fight its way through Congress, where Democrats and more liberal Republicans are already balking at plans to cut holes in a social safety net that has been saving down-on-their-luck Americans from penury and worse since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Trump’s defense budget request “is inadequate to the challenges we face, illegal under current law, and part of an overall budget proposal that is dead on arrival in Congress”, committee Chairman John McCain of Arizona said in an emailed statement.

“All POTUS budgets are”, he tweeted. “The world is a very unsafe place these days, and so I think there is a compelling – there is, I don’t think, I know there is – a compelling justification for this budget to enhance the readiness of the force”. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican.

“The President’s proposed budget has never been followed in the Senate or the House so the idea that this somehow is imposing cuts is just not true”, Cornyn said about the President’s budget proposal at the end of March.

But Democrats will still look to pin the document on their Republican colleagues. And numerous healthcare-related recommendations in it depend on the passage of the American Health Care Act, the highly controversial Republican proposal to replace Obamacare, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month but faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

Trump’s $4.1 trillion spending plan proposes to eliminate the deficit in a decade while protecting Social Security and Medicare.

The proposed budget, for the fiscal year that begins October 1, was being delivered to Congress Tuesday, setting off an extended debate in which Democrats are already attacking the administration for trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

If this budget passed and Trumponomics failed to improve the economy, the net result would be expanded income inequality and an increased national debt. Sad!

Trump’s budget makes $616 billion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years, in addition to the $880 billion in cuts already in the House’s health care bill, by changing the program’s funding formula and rolling back the expansions provided by Obamacare.

Trump also slashes Social Security Disability Insurance, a core program to help people who are physically unable to work, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a key welfare program.

-The Disabled: Trump’s budget calls for cutting Social Security disability benefits by almost $70 billion over the next decade by encouraging and, in some cases, requiring people receiving the benefits to re-enter the workforce. Critics who dispute the possibility of that, he said, are wrongheaded.

Mulvaney, who probably didn’t know he was being interrogated by Sputnik, argued back, saying that Feinberg wasn’t duly considering taxpayers and that “we have all kinds of other programs” for poor kids. “And we will do that”.

The budget proposal also follows Trump’s campaign promises to not to cut Social Security, a government-run old age pension program, or Medicare, which helps the elderly pay for doctors, hospitals and medicine.

-Border security: The proposal includes $2.6 billion for border security technology, including money to design and build a wall along the southern border. In Trump’s first major military operation, 59 Tomahawks were fired in April against a Syrian airfield said to have been used to launch a chemical attack against a city. He has called it a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese multiple times, although he has seemingly softened that stance in recent months. All states that did not expand Medicaid will see cuts to the program because of substantial changes to the funding formula.

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Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director, unveiled Trump’s ghastly 2018 budget proposal Monday afternoon in the White House briefing room, and one point of pride was that it proposed that the child-care tax credit and the earned-income tax credit – benefits for working families – be denied to illegal immigrants.

The Trump administration on Tuesday unveiled its first full budget that would cut USD3.6 trillion in government spending over the next 10 years to balance the federal budget