Will President Trump Cut Medicare And Social Security As Well As Taxes?
In the wake of Tuesday’s election results, budget deficit hawks might seem as out of fashion as smartly tailored pants suits. After all, President-elect Donald J. Trump has proposed cutting taxes by $6.2 trillion over the next decade (with 47% of that cut going to the richest 1%), while promising to spend more on the military and veterans, plus an extra $500 billion to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure. Oh, and he hasn’t exactly said how (or if) he’d pay for all those goodies.
In a paper published days before the election, Steuerle and coauthors from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that if Trump pushes through his promised tax cuts, 100% of all additional federal revenue coming in from economic growth over the next decade will be consumed by increased interest payments for the federal debt and automatic increases in Social Security and health care spending. And that’s even after assuming the two big spending cuts Trump has endorsed— a House Republican plan to cut Medicaid spending by $500 billion over a decade by turning it into a capped “block grant” payment to the states and the “penny a year” plan, which requires that all non-defense, discretionary spending be cut 1% a year in nominal terms, saving $750 billion over a decade (without, conveniently, spelling out which programs would get chopped).
So where does President-elect Trump stand on cuts to entitlements, other than the Medicaid cap he embraced during the campaign—the one that’s already built into Steuerle’s grim numbers? During the campaign, Trump promised to protect Social Security without cutting benefits, raising taxes, or raising the retirement age, suggesting a long term funding shortfall—starting in 2035, the tax dollars coming in will be enough to pay only 77% of benefits—could be solved simply by goosing the economy and cutting waste, fraud and abuse. Similarly, when it comes to Medicare, Trump has promised to protect benefits, but has offered no real ideas for curbing the growth of costs, other than allowing the program to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies,which Republicans have traditionally opposed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2016/11/10/will-president-trump-cut-medicare-and-social-security-as-well-as-taxes/#6563fb5ba43f
Trump and the Republicans are acting like Obama never excited and are just going into a third term of Bush after democrats fixed the last mess, to bad Americans are so uninformed and vote wedge issues instead of the big picture. Watching Fox News Corp is Dangerous to your health!
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