Month: March 2017

Last week President Trump released his budget proposal for discretionary spending (deficit projections and the budget projections for entitlement programs are released later and they actually make up over 70% of the federal budget, but I digress). One thing you have to say about Donald Trump is that he is not a man of half measures and his first budget is no exception.

The proposed budget increases defense spending by $54 billion and has cuts in other places of roughly the same amount, which seems to indicate that Trump intends to bring down the huge federal spending deficits by simply freezing spending, rather than increasing it every year as has been the case almost routinely.

Before we get into some of the details, let’s remember a couple of things that happen during budget time when budget cuts are being discussed, and these are true in government, in business, and in pretty much any context when talking about budgets (even family budgets often). Every time, without exception, when there is talk of budget cuts, here is what will happen:

•         The person or department who is threatened with cuts will tell you  that they will have to cut the most popular thing, or the thing that will have the biggest impact or the thing that is most critical. Why? As a tactic to ‘show what could happen’ if they don’t get all their money.
•          They will scream that the program in question only costs _____ cents a day or _____ dollars person and so it doesn’t even save much money. Well, that is really somewhat of a silly response. Overall, when divided among 350 million people in the US then most things are small by comparison. Almost everything is cheap when you look at it like that.   But a savings of a hundred million here and a hundred million there—which is less than 30 cents per person—adds up to some real money.

Budgets are about choices. Very rarely do opposing sides disagree that some program needs money or some issue would be better off with increased funding. The disagreement comes in making choices about how much money and where the money is going to come from.   Any responsible politician (which I realize is somewhat of an oxymoron) realizes that the money supply is not endless. Continue reading “Proposed Budget Released”