Eliminating government

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For the sake of what?

Well on the way to sort off eliminating government, all in the name of tax cuts for the rich, increased defense spending and an ideology in which government is always the problem, never the solution:

President Trump is expected to release his outline for federal government spending on Monday, and according to multiple news outlets, he will increase defense funding by $54 billion while leaving Social Security and Medicare as is.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, confirmed to Fox on Sunday that entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare won’t be addressed in the budget document. “We are not touching those now,” he said.

But by increasing costs on one side of the ledger — defense spending — and not addressing some of the biggest drivers of government spending—Social Security and Medicare—Trump’s budget will almost certainly involve enormous and debilitating cuts to everything else if it doesn’t want to drive up the deficit. Indeed, the administration said on Monday morning that most so-called non-defense discretionary programs — everything other than entitlements and defense — will be cut substantially to pay for the rest.

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, one big target will be the Environmental Protection Agency, whose workforce could be cut to a third of its current size. The administration also pointed to foreign aid as another place for cuts.

Previous reports have named a number of other programs that could be on the chopping block—defunded to the point of wholesale elimination. AmeriCorps; the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the Department of Justice’s Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against Women Grants; the Office of National Drug Control Policy; funding for the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the Export-Import Bank; and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Electricity, and Office of Fossil Energy, among others, could all be zeroed out.

Even so, these cuts wouldn’t get very far toward helping cover Trump’s other priorities, given that most of those programs cost less than $500 million a year out of a government that spends $3.9 trillion. All told, the savings would only come to about $2.5 billion.

By contrast, an earlier report said that Trump’s budget would cut $10.5 trillion in federal spending over a decade. That represents a far deeper reduction than any past Republican plans; the budget proposal put forward by Republicans on the House Budget Committee last year called for a $5.5 trillion cut in spending over the same timeframe, which was already higher than any previous version.

Trump’s preliminary budget makes devastating cuts to most of the government

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This is sort of funny..

Fox & Friends on Tuesday featured an interview with Daily Caller associate editor Virginia Kruta about her experience attending an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rally in St. Louis that could have been mistaken for satire. Kruta told hosts that both Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic candidate for whom she was stumping, Cori Bush, “talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent — they talk about education for your kids, health care for your kids. Things that you want.”

But for Kruta, that sort of discussion is an “uncomfortable” thing. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter clapbacks show the kids are alright It's now the 28-year-old's world and we are all just living in it. “If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it, or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, ‘my kids deserve this, and maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that,'” she added.

Host Ainsley Earhardt interjected to earnestly ask Kruta, “As a conservative, when you’re sitting in that audience or standing in that audience, and you’re listening to that message, how did it make you feel? Were you angry? Were you more drawn to that?” Kruta replied by saying she “was mostly uncomfortable, because I was surrounded by a group of people who were talking about how they had gotten involved because they were tired of being angry all the time. It seems like so much effort to be angry about everything, instead of to focus on what you could do to change it.”

Kruta also wrote a Daily Caller piece about her experience in which she characterized the Ocasio-Cortez/Bush rally as “truly terrifying,” because “I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.” She went on to mention three scary things in particular.

— I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
— I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
— Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.

This ‘Fox & Friends’ segment about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is beyond parody – ThinkProgress

And who is going to pay for those tax cuts that are:

• Not helping workers
  
• Only helping shareholders and the rich
  
• Leave a gaping budget hole
  

And why shouldn't the government help with stuff like education and healthcare. Every other rich country does it? See how healthcare and education costs have skyrocketed in the US, is it only for the well off?