While the media is entertaining us and each other about boycotts of Donald Trump’s inauguration and fake news about some of his cabinet nominees, The Hill points out that the real consequences of the election are about to come like the arrival of the Visigoths to Rome. Team Trump is planning to shrink the size of government in a dramatic fashion, eliminating about $10.5 trillion over the next ten years.
The ax would fall the length and breadth of the government, with programs being eliminated wholesale. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized.
The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated. A number of programs that conservatives have considered corporate welfare would also become history.
On the one hand, slashing $10.5 trillion in spending over 10 years, along with the projected three to four percent growth projected thanks to Trumps easing of regulation and taxes, would go a long way toward putting the federal budget into balance. That may be true even considering the plans for across the board tax cuts, an infrastructure building program, and a military buildup.
On the other hand, conservative administrations have come to power promising spending cuts before only to see such plans fall apart in the buzz saw of political reality.
Democrats and their allies in the media howl that the budget cuts will cause mass death and suffering. Skittish Republicans in Congress cave in. Most of the budget cuts do not materialize. Also, many analysts do not believe that the deficit can be cut without attention to entitlements, which so to be President Donald Trump has vowed not to touch.
Therefore, while the proposal is promising, one should categorize it as something to be believed when seen. It could be said in his favor that Trump has been underestimated so many times that one should not entirely discount the idea of these proposed budget cuts becoming reality.
Besides, this time Democrats cannot accuse Republicans of wanting to kill off Big Bird. The giant, yellow fowl, and his friends on Sesame Street moved over to HBO some years ago, proving that a market exists for PBS programming beyond government subsidized television.
