Pa.’s federal lawmakers assess Trump budget

“This trump budget is shockingly extreme”, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said.

The Washington Post, for its part, noted that for former President Barack Obama (2009-2017), the gap between rich and poor Americans was, as he said in a speech in 2013, “the defining challenge of our time”. Most people on Snap don’t rely on this for a lifetime.

“When you say “cut” are you speaking Washington or regular language?”

Mulvaney cut her off and made an impassioned case that people like Lee aren’t sufficiently concerned about his “unborn grandchildren”.

“What about the standard of living for my grandchildren who aren’t here yet?” Who will end up inheriting $30 trillion in debt?

The truth is that trillion-dollar tax cuts, most of which would flow to the wealthy, would hurt millions of other Americans. Three in four Democrats trust congressional Democrats to handle the economy compared to 84 percent of Republicans who said they have faith in their party. That’s what this is all about. Veronique de Rugy suspects that grandiose language is supposed to resonate with those voters who don’t understand how the budget process actually works. “What does it say about the previous administration or the CBO, about their view of the country, that they don’t think we’re ever going to be able to do that again?”

“Never before really have I seen such a cruel and morally bankrupt budget”.

But Mulvaney stood by the administration’s position, and slammed the “certain narrative” that Republicans “don’t care about poor people”, standing by the confidence social safety nets give people to “take risks and go out on their own”.

Add the AHCA’s $880 billion cut to the budget’s $610 billion in savings, and you’ve got the $1.4 trillion number that’s being thrown around. Trump, before he became a presidential candidate, ridiculed lawmakers for raising the debt ceiling, and Mulvaney – when he was a member of Congress – has opposed efforts to increase the debt ceiling, saying then that Congress should do more to restrain government spending.

Trump’s balanced-budget goal depends not only on the growth projections that most economists view as overly optimistic but also a variety of accounting gimmicks, including an nearly $600 billion peace dividend from winding down overseas military operations and “double counting” $2.1 trillion in revenues from economic growth – using them to both pay for tax cuts and bring down the deficit. Rep. Mark Sanford, a former SC governor who warmly greeted Mulvaney as a fellow fiscal hawk, jumped on him for the budget’s assumption of 3 percent annual economic growth.

It’s not a little detail neither: according to former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers, it is the “most egregious accounting error in a Presidential budget in the almost 40 years I have been tracking them”.

While he said he backs the broad goals under Trump’s budget, he does find disagreement with some aspects. “And I think that’s a very hard thing”.

All told, the recommendation – titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness” – would purge more than $3.5 trillion in federal spending over 10 years.

“Why? Because that’s what the president said when he was campaigning, that he would not change those things”, he said.

Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group, disagreed and said Trump’s plan would put taxpayers first by rallying Republicans around reform for expensive safety-net programs.