Monday, April 6, 2020

MEXICAN CORONAVIRUS CASES SPIKE 21% OVER WEEKEND - NANCY PELOSI SAYS "FREE" HEALTHCARE IN MEXIFORNIA ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN ANCHOR BABY WELFARE ARE WAITING FOR ALL DEM VOTING ILLEGALS


VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY?



As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Mexican Coronavirus Cases Spike 21% over Weekend

Mexico Covid News
Mexico's Health Secretariat
2:42

Mexican health officials saw a 21 percent jump in new cases of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in a span of two days, leading to a total of 2,143 since the pandemic first arrived in the country. Officials are warning the public “the toughest” part is yet to come.
Mexico’s Undersecretary of Health Hugo Lopez Gatell revealed the newest statistics in a nightly news conference from Mexico City. Currently, Mexico has 2,143 confirmed cases and 94 fatalities directly related. Health officials also revealed they are looking at 5,209 test cases.


The number of confirmed cases showed a dramatic jump from 1,688 on Friday to 2,143 on Sunday night. The two-day 21 percent movement marks the sharpest spike since the pandemic first appeared.
During the conference, Lopez Gatell warned the public the worst is yet to come as Mexico nears the time frame that he called “phase 3,” when transmissions run at such an accelerated rate where it is hard to track the source of contagion. The health official claimed phase 3 could be arriving in Mexico within two to three weeks.
“We have to be very disciplined,” Lopez Gatell said. “Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home. This is the way to control the epidemic. The more we can control spread during phase 2, the better we will fare in phase 3.”
The health official asked the public to minimize their outings to only essential trips such as getting groceries and medicine.
“That is the only way to avoid the contagion,” he said. “to reduce the number of people going out and being exposed.”
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com
Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.     

THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.

Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

He qualifies for food stamps.

He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.

His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books.

He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.



Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people! 

JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!

THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!

Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!

AMERICA: YOU’RE BETTER OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!


This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER

“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.  DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE 

 

As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Simultaneously, illegal immigration next year is on track to soar to the highest level in a decade, with a potential 600,000 border crossers expected.

“More than 750 million people want to migrate to another country permanently, according to Gallup research published Monday, as 150 world leaders sign up to the controversial UN global compact which critics say makes migration a human right.”  VIRGINIA HALE

For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about $26 billion, more than the border wall, and that does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens. 

Exclusive–Steve Camarota: Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime



JOHN BINDER
 Every illegal alien, over the course of their lifetime, costs American taxpayers about $70,000, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steve Camarota says.
During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Camarota said his research has revealed the enormous financial burden that illegal immigration has on America’s working and middle class taxpayers in terms of public services, depressed wages, and welfare.
“In a person’s lifetime, I’ve estimated that an illegal border crosser might cost taxpayers … maybe over $70,000 a year as a net cost,” Camarota said. “And that excludes the cost of their U.S.-born children, which gets pretty big when you add that in.”
LISTEN: 
“Once [an illegal alien] has a child, they can receive cash welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born children,” Camarota explained. “Once they have a child, they can live in public housing. Once they have a child, they can receive food stamps on behalf of that child. That’s how that works.”
Camarota said the education levels of illegal aliens, border crossers, and legal immigrants are largely to blame for the high level of welfare usage by the f0reign-born population in the U.S., noting that new arrivals tend to compete for jobs against America’s poor and working class communities.
In past waves of mass immigration, Camarota said, the U.S. did not have an expansive welfare system. Today’s ever-growing welfare system, coupled with mass illegal and legal immigration levels, is “extremely problematic,” according to Camarota, for American taxpayers.
The RAISE Act — reintroduced in the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) — would cut legal immigration levels in half and convert the immigration system to favor well-educated foreign nationals, thus relieving American workers and taxpayers of the nearly five-decade-long wave of booming immigration. Currently, mass legal immigration redistributes the wealth of working and middle class Americans to the country’s top earners.
“Virtually none of that existed in 1900 during the last great wave of immigration, when we also took in a number of poor people. We didn’t have a well-developed welfare state,” Camarota continued:
We’re not going to stop [the welfare state] tomorrow. So in that context, bringing in less educated people who are poor is extremely problematic for public coffers, for taxpayers in a way that it wasn’t in 1900 because the roads weren’t even paved between the cities in 1900. It’s just a totally different world. And that’s the point of the RAISE Act is to sort of bring in line immigration policy with the reality say of a large government … and a welfare state. [Emphasis added]
The immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t immediately sign up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their children up. It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which is our most expensive program. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Study: More than 7-in-10 California Immigrant

Welfare




More than 7-in-10 households headed by immigrants in the state of California are on taxpayer-funded welfare, a new study reveals.

The latest Census Bureau data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that about 72 percent of households headed by noncitizens and immigrants use one or more forms of taxpayer-funded welfare programs in California — the number one immigrant-receiving state in the U.S.
Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of households headed by native-born Americans use welfare in California.
All four states with the largest foreign-born populations, including California, have extremely high use of welfare by immigrant households. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 percent of households headed by immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare. Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of native-born households in Texas are on welfare.
In New York and Florida, a majority of households headed by immigrants and noncitizens are on welfare. Overall, about 63 percent of immigrant households use welfare while only 35 percent of native-born households use welfare.
President Trump’s administration is looking to soon implement a policy that protects American taxpayers’ dollars from funding the mass importation of welfare-dependent foreign nationals by enforcing a “public charge” rule whereby legal immigrants would be less likely to secure a permanent residency in the U.S. if they have used any forms of welfare in the past, including using Obamacare, food stamps, and public housing.
The immigration controls would be a boon for American taxpayers in the form of an annual $57.4 billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.
As Breitbart News reported, the majority of the more than 1.5 million foreign nationals entering the country every year use about 57 percent more food stamps than the average native-born American household. Overall, immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than American citizen households and 44 percent more in Medicaid dollars. This straining of public services by a booming 44 million foreign-born population translates to the average immigrant household costing American taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 


THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FOR THE RICH - We must cut social security and all social programs we can grab to offset tax cuts, bailouts and handouts to Wall Street's criminals


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

Can The Liberal World Order Survive Another Four Years of Trump?

Probably not. Here’s why.

What Would a Second Trump Term Do to the Federal Bureaucracy?

An EPA stocked with climate change deniers. A Surgeon general sympathetic to anti-vaxxers. It could get grim.

How Trump Could Take Away Obamacare With a Second Term

After packing the courts, the president’s use of executive authority will be more effective.

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.

How Trump Could Dismantle Workers’ Rights with Another Four Years

In just his first term, he’s been a fairly effective union buster.

Trump’s Second Term Immigration Agenda

Will anyone be allowed into America?

Can Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Survive a Second Trump Term?

It’s a proposition better left untested.

Why a Second Trump Term Will Not Be a Horror Movie

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 and Luisa S. Deprez

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.