Donald Trump has unveiled his very first budget to send to Congress, and as expected, it is nothing but an attack on the needy and a giveaway to the already-wealthy. He plans to cut environmental protection, disease prevention, endowments for the arts, government research grants, but don’t worry – there are plenty of tax cuts for the top 1%. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Today we finally get Donald Trump’s 2018 Make America Great Again Budget, and as every single person in this country could have expected, it is a massive giveaway to the wealthy. It’s a massive giveaway to the military-industrial complex, and it is a giant middle finger to the working class of America. One of the things he wants to do is completely eliminate in the coming years the National Endowment for the Arts, right? We don’t need arts. He wants to do away with science grants, because you know, we don’t need that. Wants to cut 30% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget because screw the environment, 20% comes off the budgets of the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, and the State Department.
Where’s all that money going to go instead? Well, it’s going to go, 54 billion of it, goes to the military, because we apparently need that, and the rest of it’s going to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts. That’s right. Donald Trump is once again enacting the age-old Republican policy of trickle-down economics, a policy that has failed every single time it has been attempted in the United States, a policy whose creator came out about a decade ago and said, “You know what? Trickle-down economics actually cannot work in practice or in theory. I was wrong,” but that doesn’t stop Donald Trump. He’s a wealthy guy. He wants those tax cuts. It’s not necessarily about helping out every other rich person in the United States. It’s about helping himself, because that’s what him winning the presidency was all about.
Furthermore, we’re going to lose thousands of jobs within the federal government. Representative from the Trump Administration said, “You can’t drain the swamp and leave everybody in it,” so we’re going to cut thousands of American jobs, the largest job cutting of federal employees since immediately following World War II when the government shrank after the war. It wasn’t necessary at the time. The number of military federal employees will now exceed the number of non-military federal employees. This is a man who campaigned on bringing back American jobs. Is there any job more American than working for the United States government, working for America literally? We’re losing 3,200 jobs from the EPA alone, thousands of jobs from other organizations. We’re losing thousands of protections for labor, for the environment. Those programs are going away completely, to protect us while we’re at work, to protect us when we’re out living life. Gone.
This is the dumbest budget I think I have seen in my years covering this, and the fact that Donald Trump is out there saying that this budget is going to make America great again, because that’s actually part of the budget title, by killing American jobs, by putting more people on the unemployment rolls, but he’s doing exactly what the Republican Party wants him to do. This has been Republican blueprint since day one. They want to shrink the size of the federal government. They want to kill the federal government, except the military, because we need that because I guess we need it to be large, and big, and show everybody that we have a giant military to make up for our small penises, I guess.
It’s the only conclusion I can come to at this point, but we’re killing thousands of American jobs. You’re about to tell thousands of people working for the government as civil servants that you’re going to go home tonight and you’re not coming back tomorrow. You’re going to go home and tell your family, tell your husband, tell your wife, tell your kids, “Hey, we don’t have money anymore.” How is that making America great again? How is that keeping any one of your campaign promises? Not that anybody thought you would keep them anyway. All you’re doing is proving what a jackass you are and proving that all of the critics of you since day one have been 100% correct.
