Washington Post Column: The GOP’s budget plan: Tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the poor

That might sound like a stale, Scroogy stereotype. But it’s not an exaggeration: It’s laid out, in black and white, in GOP budget plans released this week.

Republicans have been trying for years to reduce federal health programs and nutritional assistance, including their disastrous attempts to repeal Obamacare in 2017. But now that they’re desperate to extend and expand the Trump tax cuts, they are especially motivated to shred the safety net because they need to find cost savings somewhere.

After all, President Donald Trump came into office with promises not only to extend his tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year, but also to deliver other giveaways. These include reducing corporate taxes and eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits. These policies are both regressive and extremely expensive. Depending on exact assumptions, Trump’s overall tax agenda would cost between $5 trillion and $11 trillion over a decade, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates.

Republican lawmakers seem inclined to give him most of what he wants. So how do they plan to fill their gaping budget hole? They claim they’ll do it through a combination of fake math, nonbinding promises and shanking the poor.

For example, the House’s budget blueprint relies on ludicrous economic assumptions to paper over some of its revenue losses. Its authors assume that “productivity growth magically nearly doubles and then stays there permanently,” notes Jessica Riedl, a Manhattan Institute fellow who previously advised Republican politicians on budget issues. “This lazy gimmick is a staple of budget proposals trying to show fake savings.”

 Meanwhile, the blueprint includes a set of tables showing vague promises of future federal tightfistedness — including $3 trillion worth of unspecified “Government-Wide Savings.” It’s a wistful throwback to the Reagan-era “magic asterisk.”

 But there are also real, painful cuts coming, almost certainly concentrated in food stamps and Medicaid. These are a little hard to decipher if you don’t know your way around budget documents, so let’s decode a bit.

For example, as introduced, the House budget blueprint would require its Agriculture Committee to find at least $230 billion in cuts over a decade. This committee oversees two basic buckets of programs: food stamps and farm supports.

Republicans have expressed zero interest in reducing farm supports; to the contrary, they appear inclined to increase farm subsidies to make up for other problems Trump’s creating for farmers by cutting foreign aid. Meanwhile, Republican leadership has openly proposed gutting food stamps. Besides, given the size of these programs’ current budgets, the only way lawmakers could spare nutritional assistance entirely would be to slash farm support by three-quarters.

Then there’s Medicaid. Again, Republicans have spoken openly about slashing this popular public health insurance program many times over the years, including in a wish list distributed last month by House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas). And again, Medicaid cuts are also required by the constraints Republicans created for themselves in their own budget blueprint.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is instructed to find $880 billion in savings. This committee oversees Medicaid and parts of Medicare — as well as other programs worth $506 billion. So even if committee members zeroed out all that other stuff, they’d still have to take a whack at the two federal health programs. And since Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) have pledged not to touch Medicare, by process of elimination, that means Medicaid is on the chopping block.

Exactly how committees will slice and dice these programs is not specified. Republicans might cut programs under the guise of new or stricter “work requirements,” for example. This idea often polls well, but when Medicaid work requirements were briefly tried during Trump’s first term, they ended up backfiring. Kafkaesque reporting requirements caused Americans who already had jobs to lose the medical care they needed to continue working.

The White House is explicitly trying to “flood the zone” with distressing developments: constitutional crises, trade wars, data deletions, law enforcement purges, gutted agencies. It all deserves your attention. But don’t take your eye off Congress. Trump has his enemies list, and lawmakers have theirs. The latter might just include your ability to feed your family.