Make No Mistake: This Is Not a 'Trump Budget'

From Esquire

On the electric Twitter machine Monday night, Kenneth Baer, who used to work in the Office of Management and Budget before it was transformed into a chop shop by its current overseer, Mick Mulvaney, pried out this little gem from the administration's budget plan, which Mulvaney unveiled this morning. It concerns research and treatment for Alzheimer's Disease, a fight in which I happen to have a particularly vicious dog.

Baer is right to point out the expert trolling by whoever it was that inserted the real statistics on Alzheimer's into this fantastical-and completely inadequate-proposal. But it's the last line that caught my eye. I know a little about Alzheimer's research and none of the researchers I ever met cited a lack of "flexibility" in the states as one of their most daunting obstacles. But it is a measure of the kind of contempt for language, magical thinking, fantastical asterisks, and outright pickpocketry that comprises this latest attempt by the Republican party to shove the rest of the country's wealth upwards.

Make no mistake. This is not a "Trump budget." This is a Republican budget, a movement conservative budget, a product of the tinpot economic theory and the misbegotten Randian view of human nature towards which every serious Republican has pledged troth since the days of Reagan, a government-sanctioned fulfillment of all the wishes that Paul Ryan wished over the keg during the college experience that our contributions to Social Security helped buy him.

Mulvaney, a Tea Party fanatic, held a press conference Tuesday morning to shill for this slab of Dickensian offal, and listening to him I got the feeling that, not only is Mulvaney of a different political persuasion, but that he was raised in a different dimensional space. There are individual atrocities a'plenty: zeroing out Meals on Wheels; an outright assault on the government's role in science; a butchery of Medicaid that only makes marginal sense if the dead-fish healthcare bill passes first; shredding any EPA efforts to combat climate change; and hefty cuts to the SCHIP program for children's health, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. These are Republican proposals, movement conservative proposals, proposals that any Republican candidate would be proud to take to the Iowa caucuses in 2020.

And then there's Mulvaney himself, who is an influential figure because the Republican party is the kind of operation in which a Mick Mulvaney can be influential. From The Washington Post:

"Crazy stuff" is not a phrase that should be idly thrown around by a guy shilling for a budget that otherwise contains a $6 trillion tax cut, aimed predominantly toward the wealthy, and yet that also assumes that revenues will grow by $2 trillion over the next decade. In some airport cocktail lounge, Arthur Laffer is drawing unicorns and mermaids on all the napkins. It's so transparent a fraud that Larry Summers gagged on it in The Washington Post.

It is interesting, but not entirely significant, that the budget as presented drives over so many of the president*'s campaign promises, especially as regards Social Security and Medicaid, which the president* promised not to touch. After all, the president* is out of the country, and his promises are altogether worthless on his best days, which are not frequent.

And, while it's true that the budget Mulvaney outlined on Tuesday probably bears little resemblance to what the final document looks like, it remains a perfect statement of the modern Republican philosophy of government. It should be preserved in a golden frame at RNC headquarters, right next to the statue of Ronald Reagan.

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