Currently browsing posts about: Budget

The President’s proposed budget cuts are worth a close look.

In addition to what I’ve posted this week, I have a few comments about it.

Most of the government’s budget cannot be cut; it is mandatory.

Mandatory expenditures include defense, interest payments, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and, yes, SNAP.   These can only be cut by an act of Congress.

The cuttable discretionary programs are the ones aimed at helping everyone, but especially the poor and vulnerable (they grey parts in this chart). 

The rhetoric—anti-woke, anti-Biden, anti-science—reminds me of the McCarthy era anti-Communist rhetoric.

Anything that Biden did is bad.  Anything aimed to help minorities or women is bad.  Anything that promotes research or tries to mitigate climate change is bad.

Is the Trump Administration engaging in “soft” eugenics, as The Guardian puts it?

By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics…At the heart of all these policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive….Maha perfectly mimics Maga’s deregulatory ethos: cut social services for vulnerable populations while parroting populist language that further helps consolidate power for the most well-off.

Food for thought, as we say.

Resource

Civil Eats on the effects of Trump’s first 100 days on the food system

The Trump Administration has issued its proposed budget.

It begins with the rhetoric characteristic of this administration.

The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.

If anything, these proposals are totally contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans, so much so that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with some selections from the USDA summary on page 31.

• Food Safety Inspection Service: a $15 million increase for meat and poultry inspection
• National Institute of Food and Agriculture: $602 million decrease (“eliminates wasteful, woke programming,”… “protects funding to youth and K-12 programs such as 4-H clubs, tribal colleges, and universities”)
• Agricultural Research Service and USDA Research Statistical Agencies: $159 million decrease.  Note the rhetoric: “…stop climate-politicized additional scopes added by the Biden Administration…”
• Farm Service Agency: $358 million decrease
• State, local, tribal, and NGO conservation programs: $303 million decrease
• Commodity Supplemental Food Program: $425 million decrease .  This program, which mostly helps seniors, is being replaced with “MAHA food boxes.”

On this last one: Oh no.  Not that again.  The boxes are a logistic nightmare , absurdly expensive, and do not help any except the largest farmers.

Note that there is nothing here about SNAP, which comes out of USDA’s budget.  SNAP is an entitlement; only Congress can cut its budget, and would have to do so through the Farm Bill.

Fortunately, these are proposals, which means there is at least a chance that Congress won’t agree to them.

The New York Times did an analysis of US government expenditures that I’m still thinking about.

The annual budget is $7 trillion.  Try and get your head around that number.

Here are the two illustrations I think deserve a close look.

The expenditures in color are fixed; they cannot be cut.  The only more easily cuttable expenses are the ones in grey.  But those are the ones that make life better for all of us.

And take a look at this one.

What this tells us is that if the entire government workforce were fired, it would only reduce federal expenditures by 4.3 percent.

This is why tax cuts for the rich make no sense and are deeply unfair.

For more on this topic

The US government’s guide to federal spending

According to the Constitution’s Preamble, the purpose of the federal government is “…to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” These goals are achieved through government spending.