Trump’s Budget Abandons the Poor and Working Class Who Helped Put Him in Office

{COMMENTARY}

Mississippi social workers, if you had any doubt, lay it aside – Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about struggling working class people in this state or any other who elected him in hopes of economic relief, let alone millions of truly poor, disabled, sick, and chronically unemployed citizens.  His budget proposal is by the rich, for the rich, and all about making the rich still richer (this includes the president’s proposed military expansion, which fattens further the already obscenely bloated profits of defense contractors and their investors).

While introducing tax reductions for the already under-taxed 1%, Trump’s budget slashes spending on Medicaid, Social Security disability benefits, food stamps, Community Development Block Grants, and just about every other federal program that aids the needy.  This is class war, plain and simple, justified by the same old tired and oft-refuted arguments: (1) Federal assistance (in any form other than tax cuts, apparently) “makes” people dependent and prevents them from joining the labor force, where they belong, earning their own way; (2) tax cuts for the rich will fire up business expansion and job creation, spreading the benefits of economic growth far, wide, and deep.

Promises of prosperity by aiding the rich and denying the poor are pure poppycock, and it’s hard to believe that anyone – even someone as policy history-ignorant as our president – can make them with a straight face.  Even economists generally unfriendly to welfare state spending think the projected economic growth is so much wishful thinking.  The real results of a Trump budget?  A lot more extreme inequality, pain, suffering, and needless death, for sure.  Also, hopefully, a non-violent Trumpism resistance movement growing rapidly in both strength and size.  Mississippi social workers need to be part of that movement.