The Trump budget cometh -- May 18, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In a time of nonstop surprises in Washington, we’re about to experience a reassuringly familiar ritual.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration will deliver to Congress the president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2018 – and it will land with a thud.

“Dead on arrival,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in March.

Graham was reacting to Trump’s preliminary, so-called “skinny budget,” with massive hikes in defense and deep cuts in foreign aid and the State Department, along with other domestic programs.

Declaring the president’s budget dead is part of the familiar scenario on Capitol Hill.  

“We generally – no matter who the president is – we don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the president’s budget,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Bloomberg News Tuesday.

The president’s budget does serve a purpose. As a blueprint of where he wants to bulk up or starve programs, it’s worth more than a thousand impulsive tweets about his values.

As a political document, it lets him say he has delivered on campaign promises – and blame Congress if his proposals go nowhere.

Trump’s first four months in the White House have been a brag, bumble and blame festival. His “America first” campaign has devolved into a “Trump first” presidency that has left in its wake disappointment, if not yet disillusionment, among long-suffering supporters.

“They are in a downward spiral right now,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said of the White House.

In Trump’s self-centered world, though, he’s always the victim.

     

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately,” he told the graduating class at the Coast Guard Academy Wednesday, “especially by the media. No politician in history – and I say this with great surety – has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon want to “deconstruct” Washington. To that end, the budget reportedly will call for $800 billion in entitlement cuts over 10 years, including to Medicaid, envision fantastic economic growth of 3 percent a year, and result in a balanced budget in 10 years.  

But it’s a starting point, not a road map.

“We share some of his priorities,” McConnell said. He and other Republicans favor spending more on defense, but they insist tax cuts must be paid for.

Tax cuts “will have to be revenue-neutral,” McConnell said.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan proposed higher defense spending, tax cuts and reductions in dozens of domestic programs aimed at shrinking the size of the federal government. Congress went along with about 60 percent of the proposed spending cuts, but the national debt still soared.

There already is push back on Trump’s proposals to cut the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, public education, the arts, and safety net programs.

For example, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee in charge of NIH funding, said at a hearing Wednesday he was “very proud” Congress approved a $2 billion increase, to $34.1 billion, in NIH funding in 2017. Trump had sought a $1 billion cut.

Cole and other lawmakers plan to fight Trump’s proposed $5.8 billion cut in NIH funding for fiscal 2018 as well.

With crises du jour from the White House dominating the news and Congress, Trump’s agenda seems to be slipping away.

His much-promised tax cut is somewhere over the rainbow, along with the $1 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. A GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare finally passed the House, but the Senate is proceeding slowly.

McConnell pointedly said he’d like less drama from the White House, although that seems unlikely, given the personality of the man in the Oval Office.

Still, the Justice Department’s appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller III as special counsel overseeing the investigation into the Russian involvement in the election may tamp down the chaos.

In another ritual of Washington, Republican leaders will be working against the clock to wrap up budget negotiations and avoid a government shutdown when the fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

That’s a heavy lift, especially with the government running up against the debt ceiling this fall as well.

So watch for Republicans to ignore most of Trump’s budget proposals. He’ll win a few victories – and blame others for his defeats.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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The logic of lifting the debt limit -- June 9, 2011 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A large majority of people believe the nation’s economy would tank if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. It follows logically that a large majority would favor raising the debt ceiling.

Forget logic. Barely half of Americans favor raising the debt limit, even if Congress also sharply cuts spending. That sobering news in The Washington Post appeared under the headline: “Americans are conflicted about raising the debt limit.”

What? “Americans have a collective death wish about the economy” wouldn’t fit on the page?

Seventy-one percent of people thought failing to raise the debt limit would cause serious harm to the economy, but only 51 percent supported raising the limit while making deep spending cuts, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

People have heard the dire warnings about what happens if we default on our financial obligations -- and they just don’t care? Are they really saying, “Let’s throw the economy under the train right now. It’s still weak and won’t put up much of a fight”?

I don’t think so, not for a minute. Nobody wants the economy to fail. People are desperate for jobs and economic security. Something else must be going on. Another response in the Post survey crystallized the political problem behind the debt ceiling question.

Asked which political party would do a better job coping with the big problems facing the country over the next few years, one person in five volunteered “neither.” Neither. That’s harsh. And entirely logical.

Neither party has come through the last couple of years dusted in gold. Overall, people trust Democrats more than Republicans, 41 percent to 32 percent, the poll found, but Democrats can't feel good knowing only two people in five have confidence in them.

Washington exists in a parallel universe where the drama concerns how deeply to slash spending and remake government. Poll after poll shows there’s no great appetite in the country for the kinds of big programmatic changes being considered. People favor spending about the same for Medicare and Medicaid.

Interestingly, seniors oppose the Medicare restructuring passed by House Republicans even though they’d be protected and the changes would affect only younger retirees.

I’m not saying we can’t think of worthy cuts. But we know, if we think about it, that each cut comes with a cost.

The federal workforce? Pluck that low-hanging fruit. We surely don’t need so many bureaucrats, uh, unless they’re the physicians and scientists at the National Institutes of Health curing cancer. Them we need.

Congressional pay? Surely I’m not alone in my unhappy thoughts that my tax dollars go toward the $174,000-a-year salary, plus benefits, of one Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

Waste, fraud and abuse? Our old friends. We should stamp out all three, absolutely, and every administration tries. Even the Pentagon isn’t buying $600 toilets and $400 hammers anymore.

The home mortgage interest deduction is a classic example of how difficult it is to curb tax expenditures, the tax code’s revenue losers. President Obama and his bipartisan fiscal commission proposed scaling back the deduction. It’s logical as the deduction is costly and favors wealthier taxpayers.

Some 35 million Americans claim the mortgage deduction, and it will cost the federal government $131 billion in lost revenue in 2012 alone, according to Calvin Johnson, a tax professor at the University of Texas. To take the deduction, though, you have to itemize, and only the top third of wage earners itemize. Two-thirds of taxpayers aren’t even eligible for the break.

Johnson also told David Kocieniewski of The New York Times last year, “No one can make a serious intellectual argument in favor of the mortgage interest deduction.” And he said, “Why should the government subsidize homeowners rather than renters? The only thing it’s good for is middle-class votes.”

Not exactly. The housing industry has suffered a lot over the last few years, and this hardly is the time to add economic stress. The National Association of Home Builders has a Web effort savemymortgageinterestdeduction.com. Rep. Gary G. Miller, R-Calif., introduced a sense of the Congress resolution that says the deduction should be left unrestricted. More than 150 cosponsors have signed on.

And there’s this. Asked whether the deduction should be eliminated, 61 percent of Americans said no. This was true even though only 43 percent said they personally took the deduction, a Gallup-USA Today poll found in April.

Like the seniors who want to preserve Medicare for their younger friends and relatives, people who don’t take the mortgage deduction want others to benefit. We’re all in this together.

That’s so logical even politicians should understand it.

© 2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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