RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump did something extremely rare in Washington on Friday. He offered a budget plan that proposes actual, honest-to-goodness cuts in spending next year. Which helps explain the hysterical reaction from the usual suspects.

Normally, White House budget proposals claim to be cutting spending when all they are doing is slowing the growth in spending. Or they promise spending cuts far down the road while boosting outlays in the short term.

But the budget outline Trump released Friday does none of that. In sticking with Trump’s “revolution of common sense,” when it says it cuts spending, it cuts spending – meaning spending less next year than this year.

Trump wants to reduce spending on domestic programs by $163 billion next year – which would be almost 23% less than the federal government will spend this year on things such as education, the environment, energy, transportation, foreign aid.

So, it’s not surprising to see headlines that scream that Trump’s is a “scorched earth” plan that “slashes spending,” makes “drastic cuts,” and – our favorite headline from the New York Times – proposes “Slashing Domestic Spending to the Lowest Level of the Modern Era.”

Right now, reporters are scouring the country for examples they can trot out – or invent – of how these spending cuts will harm children, gut scientific research and throw people on the streets.

But, while we commend Trump for proposing deep cuts this year – and for laying out in plain English what he wants to cut and why – let’s not get carried away. What he’s proposing is far from “drastic.”

If Trump got his way – which is doubtful considering how weak-kneed Republicans in Congress are when it comes to spending cuts – his plan would simply remove the massive increase in spending that happened during and after COVID.

In 2019, the government spent $661 billion on domestic programs. That shot up to $1.1 trillion the next year, and stayed above $900 billion in the years since. Trump proposes spending $679 billion. True, after inflation, that’s still a real cut in spending, but hardly constitutes slashing and burning the federal government.

What’s more, Trump proposes to protect the Defense budget from cuts.

Then there’s the fact that spending on domestic programs accounts for only 13% of all federal spending.

Spending on so-called mandatory programs – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, welfare, and the like – eat up 60% of all spending. Heck, we will spend more on interest payments on the national debt this year than all those domestic programs combined.

Oh, and that $163 billion in spending cuts … they are against a deficit that is expected to be around $2 trillion.

These cuts, in other words, will do little to affect the long-term and unsustainable trajectory of federal deficits and debt.

But you’d never know any of this given the hyperbolic reaction from Democrats, the press, and some hopelessly imbecilic Republicans.