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Key benchmarks in President Donald Trump’s budget

Source: X News Press

Nutritional assistance will be cut by $192 billion and overall welfare programs will be sliced by $272 billion, The New York Times reported.
The President’s first major budget proposal, which assumes the Medicaid savings in the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) will be passed, would make $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. Fair enough, though Trump also promised not to touch Medicaid, and the health-care bill he backs does exactly that. In 2016, about 7.7 million people received WIC benefits each month, with children and infants accounting for almost six million in the program.
Trump’s proposal slashes student loan programs, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program and other social safety net programs. But the program stayed largely intact.
“You would hope that they would want to ask the folks who know the most about it”, said Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, adding he and his staff were not consulted ahead of the proposal of large crop insurance cuts which he can not support.
The State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency would each see their budgets cut by about a third, while defense spending would increase by more than $50 billion in 2018, or around 10 percent above 2017 levels.
“When we talk about cuts to Medicaid, we’re talking about cuts to children’s health coverage, because in Idaho, about 75 percent of the Medicaid enrollees are children”, Necochea said.
Members of Congress have emphasized that the president’s budget is just a starting off point and rarely passes as is. And also it relies on a relatively rosy forecast of what’s going to happen with the USA economy.
President Donald Trump’s first budget unveiled Tuesday proposes steep cuts to social safety net programs used by hundreds of thousands of Utahns, according to critics.
Chase Thomas with the Alliance for a Better Utah, said the budget priorities are upside down.
Pearce also praised the “support Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Lab, and WIPP”.
That decrease includes a re-shaping of the way some countries receive military aid from the United States.
Even Republicans in New Jersey’s federal delegation were lukewarm to Trump’s concept.
U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan said the budget’s monicker is “laughable”.
Trump’s initial budget outline for discretionary spending received a tepid response from Congress, which controls the purse strings, and, ultimately, government spending. It calls for more spending on defense and border security. There’s little appetite among Capitol Hill Republicans for a genuine effort to balance the budget; GOP lawmakers this year are instead pressing to rewrite the tax code and forge a spending deal with Democrats that would permit higher military spending. He added that it’s “important to adequately fund the critical programs and services many Americans, like my constituents in California’s Central Valley, rely on every day”. “It is refreshing to see a president diligently attempt to provide our nation with a balanced and sustainable budget”.
The $1.6 billion is a fraction of the estimated cost of the controversial wall.
And even while decrying the large cuts in the president’s budget, which longtime GOP Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky deemed “draconian”, GOP lawmakers were also expressing frustration that Trump was leaving Social Security and Medicare largely intact – another area where Trump’s goals stand in conflict with those of congressional Republicans.
That goal, however, depends on growth projections that most economists view as overly optimistic and a variety of accounting gimmicks, including an nearly $600 billion peace dividend from winding down overseas military operations. Tax cuts would primarily benefit the affluent.
Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., laced into the president’s budget plan, saying it was based on fanciful economic predictions of high growth rates but low inflation and bond yields that would make managing the government’s $20 trillion debt less costly.
“You have to have compassion for folks receiving federal funds, but you also need compassion for folks paying it”, said White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney while briefing reporters.
The White House’s assumption is that economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product, will reach 3 percent annually by 2020, and then remain there.
Read X News Press article here.
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