When Medicaid Is The Donald’s No Play Around Zone—It’s All Over Except The Shouting
At some point a clarifying event occurs which confirms that you are at the end of the road. In this particular case we are talking again about the bothersome subject of fiscal sanity—and the exclamation point the Donald supplied recently when his was trolling the House GOP caucus in behalf of his Big Beautiful Bill.
In order to ensure the extension of his precious (but unpaid for) 2017 tax cut and provide budgetary sanction for a 13% increase in defense spending and 60% rise in outlays for border control, the Donald doesn’t want any “grandstanders” upsetting the works:
“Don’t f‑‑‑ around with Medicaid,” Trump told lawmakers in the private meeting. Trump had told reporters before the meeting that the bill is not cutting “anything meaningful (from Medicaid),” and instead was focused on “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Well, let’s see. Along with his defense and border control increases, Trump has ruled out cuts in Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and presumably interest on the public debt. So those sacred cows alone account for fully $62 trillion or 66% of total Federal spending over the next 10-years, and today he was commanding the corporal’s guard of fiscal hawks left in the GOP caucus to stay away from another $8.2 trillion in Medicaid spending over the decade, too.
So that’s a no-fly zone amounting to more than $70 trillion or 77% of Federal spending during the 10-year budget window ahead. In turn, that means there’s only $24 trillion left to cut, representing the entirety of the rest of the Federal government from the Washington Monument to the Klondike National Park in Alaska.
Then again, what’s left outside of this $70 trillion ring-fence also happens to be less than the size of the out-of-control deficit that would result from the Donald’s Great Big Beautiful Bill over the next 10-years. The idea of painting yourself into a corner, therefore, hardly does justice to the sheer fiscal lunacy of where the Trumpified GOP has implanted itself.
And, no, you are not going to save more than nickels and dimes by attacking “fraud, waste and abuse”, which the Donald apparently claims to be his alternative. Indeed, we know from first hand experience that “waste, fraud and abuse”reduction is the go to hi
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
