The White House justifies its savage budget with a divisive lie
As the Trump White House works to sell its budget proposal, which was released today, there’s a revealing ideological argument emerging to justify the absolutely brutal cuts to social programs that the budget includes. Americans, the administration is saying, come in two types: the deserving and the undeserving, the taxpayers and the moochers.
You don’t have to worry about the way we’re eviscerating so many programs, because we’re only going after those people. It’s based on a fundamental lie: that there are taxpayers and then there are people who use social programs, and the two are not only not the same people, the groups don’t even overlap. Here’s how White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney describes it:
“If I had sort of a subtitle for this budget, it would be the Taxpayer First Budget. This is I think the first time in a long time that an administration has written a budget through the eyes of the people who are actually paying the taxes. So often in Washington I think we look only on the recipient side: How does the budget affect those who either receive or don’t receive benefits?…Can I ask somebody, a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to pay tax money to the government so that I can do X?”
The whole point here is to set “taxpayers” against the supposedly undeserving whose scams and schemes can be stopped with only indiscriminate cuts to social programs. Watching Mulvaney answer questions from the press this morning, that idea came through again and again. Every time he’d get a question about a specific cut the administration proposes — to Social Security disability, to food stamps, to Medicaid — Mulvaney would say that the only people who would suffer would be those who don’t deserve to get the benefit in the first place. “We are not kicking anybody off of any program who really needs it,” he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-white-house-justifies-its-savage-budget-with-a-divisive-lie/ar-BBBszPT?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
Yet a lot of righties online are falling for this horseshit.
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