THE GOAL OF THE TRUMP
REGIME IS TO TRANSFER EVEN MORE OF THE ECONOMY TO THE BANKSTER CLASS THAN
BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN EVEN DREAMED POSSIBLE.
“The proposed cuts
would transfer trillions of dollars from the masses of working people into the
hands of the financial aristocracy and affluent upper-middle class, having
devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of workers from cradle to
grave and exposing the utter fraud of Trump’s claim to represent the “forgotten
men and women.”
What If Trump Wins?
The Washington Monthly explores the policy
consequences of a second Trump term.
For many people, the prospect of what might happen if Donald
Trump wins a second term is too awful to contemplate. But, as we are witnessing
with the coronavirus, not contemplating scenarios that have at least some
chance of happening is a grave mistake. Indeed, it’s a mistake that helped
elect Trump in the first place.
Ideally, the press corps would be hard at work exploring
this question. Alas, it is not. In the thousands of presidential campaign
stories that have been published this year, you will be hard pressed to find
much reporting or informed speculation about what policies Trump might pursue
if he’s reelected, or what the consequences might be if he were successful in
enacting them. That’s not because such things aren’t knowable in advance. If
that were the problem, political reporters wouldn’t have spent the last six
months gaming out which candidates were, say, likely to win which primaries.
The real reason campaign journalists don’t do this kind of work is that it’s
not what they’re trained to do—and, perhaps, it’s not what most people want to
read.
We think our readers are different. So we gathered a
distinguished group of area experts and beat reporters. We told them to imagine
that, come November of 2020, Trump wins the Electoral College and the balance
of power in Congress remains unchanged; Republicans hold the Senate and
Democrats hold the House. Then, we asked them to think through the hitherto
unthinkable: What will Trump aim to do, and what could he realistically get
away with, if given another four years in power? —The Editors
Probably not. Here’s why.
An EPA stocked with climate change deniers. A Surgeon
general sympathetic to anti-vaxxers. It could get grim.
After packing the courts, the president’s use of executive
authority will be more effective.
There’s a backdoor tactic the administration would use to
weaken programs that help the poor.
In just his first term, he’s been a fairly effective union
buster.
Will anyone be allowed into America?
It’s a proposition better left untested.
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen. But if it does, we won’t be
helpless.
How Trump Would Gut the Social Safety Net With a Second Term
There’s a backdoor tactic the administration would use to
weaken programs that help the poor.
Amy Swan
This essay is part of a package imagining the policy
consequences of a second Trump term. Read the rest of the essays here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please
consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and
rely on the support of our readers. In return for a contribution of $50 or
more, you’ll receive a complimentary one-year subscription to our print
edition.
In January 2018, the Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that it would support states
that wanted to add work requirements to Medicaid. Six months later, Arkansas
became the first state to put that guidance into practice.
The results were disastrous.
More than 18,000 people lost health coverage. It turns out, however, that most
of those people had met the requirement or qualified for an exemption. So why
did they lose their health care? The new regulations required recipients to log
their hours online—something that was almost impossible for those who had no
internet access or who tried accessing the website during its nightly
shutdowns. Meanwhile, administrative mistakes meant lost coverage for
thousands.
A district court halted
Arkansas’s work requirements, concluding that states cannot “refashion the
program Congress designed in any way they choose.” The rule has since bounced
around in the court system, as more states have attempted to add work
requirements, and more judges have struck them down. The Trump administration
will likely take their case to the Supreme Court, and there is no telling how
the Court might rule on it.
Medicaid
work requirements are just a glimpse into the Trump administration’s unified,
coherent, and intentional assault on the safety net. It has also targeted food
stamps, public housing, health care, and immigrant services with changes that
would make benefits harder to access. These attacks ignore the broad public
support of government programs, and reams of social-science research, putting
millions of Americans at risk.
But unlike the GOP playbook of
yore, where changes or cuts to safety net programs played out through the
legislative process, Trump’s approach takes place almost exclusively behind the
scenes—through executive actions and administrative rule making, and in the
federal courts. While some of the administration’s proposals have proceeded,
the courts have, until now, served as an important bulwark against these
initiatives. If Trump wins a second term, that’s likely to change.
Republican efforts to cut
safety net programs are not new. When Ronald Reagan came to power in the early
1980s, he launched an aggressive campaign against the welfare state, arguing
that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society project was “the central political error of
our time.” The Reagan administration reduced funding for a range of safety net
programs and restructured them to shift authority to the states.
Republicans accomplished much
of their agenda in that era by working with moderate and conservative Democrats.
But that bipartisanship—as well as public support for many antipoverty
policies—limited their efforts to dismantle the programs.
Trump differs from his
conservative predecessors in that he has made no such effort to work with
Democrats. His first attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act was profoundly
unpopular, with support for the effort polling in the teens and 20s, the lowest
ratings for any major piece of legislation in at least a generation.
Republicans nonetheless tried to ram through several bills, which generated
widespread protest and outrage, and eventually failed. Congressional efforts to
cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as
food stamps, were also unsuccessful.
Past
Republican presidents tried to cut social programs through legislation. Trump’s
approach is taking place almost exclusively behind the scenes.
And so, the Trump administration
has shifted its attention away from Congress and to the rule-making process.
Last year, in the span of nine months, the Agriculture Department proposed a
bevy of changes to SNAP. For example, they proposed tightening work
requirements and raising the income and asset limits that determine
eligibility. Court decisions have stopped work requirements for now, and the
asset rule has yet to go into effect. But if it does, about three million
people will lose benefits.
Other agencies have been busy
changing rules, too. Under dispute in the courts now is a proposal from the
Health and Human Services Department that would allow health care providers to
withhold medical services, medications, and information if they have moral or
religious objections.
The Department of Housing and
Urban Development proposed a rule forbidding people who qualify for public
housing from living with an undocumented family member. For some, loss of
housing or family separation would become the only options.
In many instances the courts
have blocked these changes. But there are ominous signs on the
horizon—specifically from the Supreme Court. In January, it overturned a lower
court’s injunction and allowed the Department of Homeland Security’s “public
charge” rule to move forward. The rule allows the federal government to deny
green cards to immigrants who use Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers, or
other forms of public assistance. In late February, the administration began
implementing that change.
The lower courts’ resistance to
the administration’s proposals has come to frustrate many prominent
conservatives, including at least one on the Supreme Court. Justice Neil
Gorsuch has criticized this “increasingly common” use of nationwide injunctions
by district court judges to halt government policies, and has vigorously urged
the Court to confront the issue.
If given four more years, Trump
will continue to work with Republicans in the Senate to reshape the judicial
system to accommodate conservatives’ decades-long goal of dismantling the
welfare state. He has, at breakneck speed, already appointed more than a
quarter of the active judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals. His judicial
appointees are also comparatively younger than his predecessors’, extending
their long-term power. Trump’s judicial legacy will entrench conservative
governance for the foreseeable future.
IThe U.S. safety net is not easily understood. More than
80 interwoven and interdependent programs are spread across several departments
and agencies. Nearly every program has different application procedures,
eligibility criteria, and benefit levels. For millions of underemployed
workers, children needing free lunch, families with exorbitant health care
bills, people who cannot work because of a disability or chronic illness, and
others, these programs may be the only reason they get by. But the vastness of
the safety net makes it difficult to protect.
The programs
do, however, have one unifying element: Nearly all of them use the federal
poverty line to determine eligibility. Changing that line would hit all the
programs at once, upending the lives of millions.
In 2019, the Trump
administration proposed redefining the poverty line formula and changing how
inflation is factored in. While it is not clear which inflation index the
administration would use, it seems likely they would choose one that grows
slowly. In other words, as the cost of living increases for everyone, the
federal poverty line would stay comparatively low.
This change would ripple across
the dozens of federal programs that use the poverty line in some way. More than
250,000 low-income seniors and people with disabilities would receive less help
from Medicare, or lose it altogether; over 300,000 children would lose
comprehensive health coverage, as would some pregnant women; at least 250,000
adults would lose health care coverage that they gained through the ACA’s
Medicaid expansion; around 40,000 infants and young children would lose
nutritional supplements; and more than 200,000 people, most of them in working
households, would lose food stamps.
It is
unclear whether the administration even has the authority to make this change
on its own, but that has not stopped them before. For now, the rule is under review and hasn’t been finalized. If it
is, it will almost certainly be challenged in court. But if that case comes
before a judge who is sympathetic to the administration’s argument, millions of
Americans could lose access to health care, food assistance, prescription drug
benefits, heating assistance, or housing subsidies.
Government antipoverty programs
work. Census data shows the massive economic impact these programs have on
low-wage workers: In 2018, income from these programs kept more than 47 million
people out of poverty. During economic downturns, they play a critical role in
helping low-income families meet basic needs and act as a stimulus for the
economy. Studies of the Great Recession suggest that the effects of
unemployment spikes and poverty increases were buffered by safety net programs
that acted as a counterforce. The changes proposed by the Trump administration
will likely obliterate this cushion in the next recession.
Incomes are soaring and poverty is plummeting, Donald
Trump said during the State of the Union address in February. “Our economy,” he
said, “is the best it has ever been.” The facts reveal a different reality. A
2017 study showed that nearly 40 percent of Americans cannot pay for a $400
emergency expense. Income inequality is worsening, and the racial wealth gap is
widening. Real wages have stagnated. Inflation and rising prices are creating
new economic burdens for low-income families. A third of Americans struggle to
afford food, shelter, or medical care. Social mobility has plummeted.
The 2021 budget proposal
confirms Trump’s intent to cut social programs. Billions of dollars in spending
on programs that provide economic stability and health care for families could
be slashed. Student loan assistance, Medicaid, children’s health insurance,
food stamps, housing assistance, disability insurance, heating assistance, and
Medicare all face major reductions.
If Trump wins a second term,
the emergence of a stingier, more punitive, and increasingly burdensome safety
net would be a high priority for the administration. The federal court
system—not Congress—would become the primary battlefield where social policy is
contested. The judicial system, ripe with appointments of like-minded judges
and perhaps another justice to the Supreme Court, would wage the
administration’s war on the safety net. The damage to the policy infrastructure
would not be easily undone. In the meantime, millions of already sidelined
Americans would become hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable, eradicating any
shot at the American dream—or even just plain survival.
Ryan
LaRochelle is a Lecturer at the Cohen Institute for Leadership and Public
Service at the University of Maine. Luisa S. Deprez is Professor Emerita of
Sociology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine.
They co-l
Trump’s budget proposal: A new offensive in the social
counterrevolution
12
February 2020
Donald Trump’s proposed
federal budget is an announcement that the American ruling class is deepening
its offensive against the social rights and living conditions of the US and
international working class.
The proposed cuts would
transfer trillions of dollars from the masses of working people into the hands
of the financial aristocracy and affluent upper-middle class, having
devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of workers from cradle to
grave and exposing the utter fraud of Trump’s claim to represent the “forgotten
men and women.”
President Donald J.
Trump talks to members of the press [Official White House Photo by Joyce N.
Boghosian]
Trump proposes to cut
$900 billion from Medicaid, $500 billion from Medicare, $24 billion from Social
Security and billions more from after school programs for working class
children, programs for homeless students, aid for impoverished rural schools,
programs that subsidize federal student loans, food stamps and programs for
impoverished infants and their mothers. It also places the US military on a war
footing toward “great power” rivals Russia and China, including a $50 billion
plan to modernize the US nuclear arsenal.
Trump’s proposed cuts
to departments such as Education (8 percent), Interior (13.4 percent), Housing
and Urban Development (15.2 percent), Health and Human Services (9 percent) and
Environmental Protection (26.5 percent) are steps toward dismantling social
programs and government regulation of corporate activity.
The announcement of the
White House budget proposal begins the staged process in which the Democratic
Party feigns indignation over the proposed cuts only to ultimately accede to
many of the demands. Under conditions where the vast majority of Americans are
demanding increased spending on social programs, higher taxes on the rich and a
redistribution of wealth, the inevitable outcome of the bipartisan budget
negotiations will be to shift the entire political establishment further to the
right.
This was previewed by
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who, when asked last Thursday
about Trump’s forthcoming budget, said:
I say to my members all
the time, ‘There is no such thing as eternal animosity. There are eternal
friendships, but you never know on what cause you may come together with
someone you may perceive as your foe right now. Everybody is a possible ally in
whatever comes next.’
This offer of
friendship to Trump came less than 24 hours after the collapse of the
Democratic Party’s impeachment effort, a process in which Pelosi and Democratic
impeachment managers called Trump a “traitor” and stooge of Russia for
withholding $391 million in military aid to the right-wing nationalist
government in Ukraine, which provides money and arms to far-right paramilitary
forces. Speaking the language of McCarthyism, the lead Democratic impeachment
manager Adam Schiff said Trump was obstructing the US from arming Ukraine, an
imperative that ensures “we can fight Russia over there so we don’t have to
fight Russia here.”
The denunciations of
Trump by the Democratic leadership on questions of imperialist foreign policy
and the Democrats’ crusade for internet censorship contrast with their appeals
to bipartisan friendship on social and domestic policy.
From the day Trump took
office, the Democratic Party has facilitated Trump’s attack on living
conditions and democratic rights, first by diverting and suppressing mass
protests that erupted immediately following Trump’s inauguration in January
2017 and in response to his travel ban and attacks on immigrants, and then,
over the last three years, by voting for major elements of Trump’s agenda.
In June 2019, the
Democrats voted overwhelmingly to support passage of Trump’s record $750
billion Pentagon budget, which allowed the government to continue to detain
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and provided $3.6 billion in “back-fill” funding
for Trump’s border wall.
In June 2019, Democrats
voted to provide Trump with $4.6 billion to fund Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) despite massive
opposition to family separation and the detention of immigrant children,
ongoing issues which the Democratic Party and corporate media have essentially
blacked out from national coverage.
These are only the most
egregious examples. Trump’s corporate tax cut, which the proposed budget will
extend, was initially proposed by the Obama White House. Obama slashed funding
for food stamps, Medicare, and programs for impoverished children and other
programs.
Today, some Democratic
presidential candidates have used Trump’s budget proposal as an opportunity to
demand further deficit reduction, verbally opposing his budget but focusing
attacks on Bernie Sanders’ proposals to modestly increase social spending.
The Washington Post noted yesterday
that after Trump’s budget was leaked in the Wall Street Journal, “Former vice
president Joe Biden has warned Democrats not to embrace an agenda that calls
for unrealistic social policy goals, and Buttigieg declared at a town hall
event in Nashua, N.H. on Sunday that it was time to get serious about the rising
deficit, even though ‘it’s not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too
much about the debt.’”
The Democratic-aligned
corporate media has greeted Trump’s budget with far less concern than the
prospect that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will win the Democratic
nomination.
In the lead-up to
yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, television personality Chris Matthews
claimed that socialists will carry out “executions in Central Park,” while
Chuck Todd compared Sanders supporters to Nazi “brown shirts.”
This language shows
that however serious their internal conflicts, both factions of the ruling
class are allied in the existential struggle to protect the wealth of the
financial aristocracy from the growing mood of social opposition from below.
They do not fear Sanders, a longtime Washington insider and loyal Democratic
caucus member. What they fear is the growing leftward movement among workers,
youth and students reflected in the support for Sanders which the Vermont
senator may not be able to control.
All factions of the
ruling class view the mass demonstrations in France, Chile, Puerto Rico, Sudan
and elsewhere as signs of what is to come.
Trump, having emerged
victorious from the impeachment, is preparing for the class battles ahead by building
a fascistic movement and threatening to stay in power regardless of the outcome
of the 2020 elections.
Sections of the
Democratic Party are using a different technique, elevating figures like
Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to feed popular illusions that the Democratic Party can be
reformed, that the ruling class can be pressured to enact progressive social
policy and that no independent social struggle is required.
This is a hopeless
utopia. Even if Sanders manages to win the nomination in the face of widespread
corruption in the DNC, his entire program amounts to asking the network of
generals and CEOs who run America to voluntarily part with trillions of
dollars. In explaining the futility of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Leon
Trotsky wrote that the New Dealers “wind up by appealing to the monopolists not
to forget decency and the principles of democracy. Just how is this better than
prayers for rain?”
The Socialist Equality
Party’s candidates in the 2020 elections—Joseph Kishore for president and
Norissa Santa Cruz for vice president—call on workers and youth to break with
the two parties of American capitalism and harness their immense social power
in the struggle for control of the commanding heights of the world economy.
The entire budget
proposed by Trump totals $4.8 trillion—far less than the $27 trillion possessed
by the world’s 2,170 billionaires. Redistributing the world’s wealth requires
the building of a mass revolutionary movement to confiscate the wealth of the
financial aristocracy and place the world’s productive forces under the
democratic control of the international working class.
Trump outlines massive
cuts in Medicaid and Medicare in 2021 budget plan
By Kevin Reed
President Trump is
planning to release a 2021 budget on Monday that includes deep cuts to
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other mandatory and discretionary
spending while also increasing funding for the military, according to a report
in the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal report, based on
information provided by a senior administration official, said that the $4.8
trillion budget “charts a path for a potential second term” by planning to
raise military spending by 0.3 percent, to $740.5 billion, and lowering
nondefense spending by 5 percent, to $590 billion, for the fiscal year that
begins October 1, 2020. The cuts to social programs would be below the level
Congress and the president agreed to in a two-year budget deal last summer.
Emboldened by his acquittal
in the Senate impeachment trial last Wednesday, Trump is making it clear that
he is going on the offensive to attack the working class by proposing to cut
essential programs and increase the military budget in preparation for future
imperialist wars. The budget also calls for $2 billion in new funding for the
southern US border wall that is a critical element of the Trump
administration’s extreme right-wing racist campaign against immigrants.
President
Donald Trump with Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management
and Budget, in 2019 [Credit: Evan Vucci/AP]
The new White House
budget proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over ten years by reducing
mandatory programs by $2 trillion. This includes $292 billion from safety-net
programs by changing the work requirements to receive Medicaid and food stamps
and $70 billion by restricting access to disability benefits.
The plan to attack
Medicare in particular is an explicit repudiation of Trump’s campaign promises
in 2016 that he would protect this program, which underwrites health care
coverage for nearly all Americans aged 65 and older, and for many disabled
people of all ages. Other reported cuts include a 21 percent reduction to State
Department and foreign aid funding, a 26 percent cut to the Environmental
Protection Agency and a 15 percent cut to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development.
Press reports
suggesting the Pentagon budget will rise only 0.3 percent, after three years of
whopping increases, are likely a political smokescreen by the White House. Much
of the increase in military spending comes in the form of an Overseas
Contingency Operations fund that is not accounted for in the regular budget.
Last year, the Trump administration proposed a similar dodge, but the increases
were ultimately made in the regular Pentagon budget, not the OCO, and dutifully
rubber-stamped by both the Republican-controlled Senate and the
Democratic-controlled House.
Besides direct Pentagon
spending, there will be war-related increases in the Department of Veterans
Affairs (13 percent), the Department of Homeland Security (3 percent) and the
National Nuclear Security Administration (19 percent).
In order to fulfill his
goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2024—which was presented
as a major objective in his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President
Trump is also proposing a 12 percent increase in NASA funding next year.
There are two
interconnected and overriding considerations in the 2021 budget plan. Together
these amount to a significant acceleration of the wealth transfer from the
working class to the top one percent that has been underway for the past four
decades.
2021
budget categories proposed by the White House over the next decade
The first priority is
the maintenance of the $1.5 trillion tax cuts—enacted in 2017 and set to expire
in 2025—for corporations and the wealthy, which reduced government revenues and
drove deficits up to 4.7 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the 2.7
percent average of the past 50 years. The second consideration is the drive to
reduce and eventually eliminate the social programs like Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, on which the most vulnerable sections of the
working class and poor depend.
The federal deficit is
estimated at $1 trillion for 2020, more than double what the Trump
administration claimed in the budget and tax cut proposals in 2017. The new
plan claims the deficit will be reduced by a total of $4.6 trillion in the next
decade and will be completely eliminated by 2035. During the 2016 election
campaign, Trump promised to completely pay off the federal debt in eight years.
Instead, it has rocketed upwards to $23 trillion, the largest of any country in
the world.
Meanwhile, the plan
assumes a pace of overall economic growth that is significantly higher than
that which is predicted by most economists. The Trump budget plan projects an
economic growth rate of 3.1 percent in the final quarter of fiscal 2020 and 3.0
percent in all of 2021 and the rest of the decade. The US economy has been
growing at a quarterly average rate of approximately 2.2 percent throughout the
Trump presidency. The Congressional Budget Office projects growth rates of
between 1.6 and 1.7 percent over the next ten years.
Trump claimed he would
accelerate US economic growth to four and even five percent, but this is
impossible under capitalism, dominated by financial speculation, wage cutting,
and militarism. The plan also makes the assumption that interest rates will
remain at historic lows for another ten years.
The budget plan will
have little immediate effect, since neither the Democratic-controlled House nor
the Republican-controlled Senate would agree to such massive cuts on the eve of
the elections. Instead, the document represents an assurance by Trump to
corporate America of the general trajectory of his administration, assuming he
remains in office.
As has been the case
throughout the Trump presidency, including during the disastrously unsuccessful
attempt to remove him from office, the Democrats are mouthing opposition while
preparing to collaborate with the White House on the 2021 budget. Several
provisions are designed for the purpose of providing a path for House Democrats
to negotiate with Trump, such as the offer to carve $130 billion from Medicare
prescription drug costs by forcing a drop in prices.
Typical of the
posturing by Democrats was a statement released on Friday by the House Budget
Committee majority that said it was on “high alert” for attempts by the
administration to circumvent Congress. “If the budget is as destructive and
irresponsible as the President’s previous proposals, House Democrats will do
everything in our power to stop the cuts and policies from coming to pass,”
they said.