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Presidential budgets are usually declared dead soon after their release. President Trump's budget for FY2019, however, was dead before it even arrived. It was doomed by the horrendous budget deal that was made by congressional Republicans and Democrats—and then signed by Mr. Trump himself. Even still, the budget is yet another sign of how little this administration cares about maintaining the barest pretense of fiscal responsibility.Last week's budget deal made the numbers proposed in his administration's budget instantly obsolete.The administration just signed a budget agreement that busted the non-defense budget caps and increased funding for this category by more than 10 percent. This makes the proposed cuts in non-defense spending laughable. The administration would concentrate $1.5 trillion in cuts over ten years exclusively on the non-defense side if the budget, while defense spending would grow by $800 billion over that same period of time. Even if the administration was serious about fiscal restraint, the imbalance between defense and non-defense would make the cuts politically impossible.Just because the administration's budget outlines some potential ways to cut spending, one shouldn't actually believe that spending is going to go down. It won't.According to the budget document, the government will spend $4.4 trillion in FY2019 and will grow spending by $1.7 trillion over ten years to $6.1 trillion in FY2028. Discretionary spending, both defense and non-defense, will increase, as will the mandatory side of the budget—and federal debt and deficits with it.The budget proposal's spending cuts, in other words, are totally imaginary. The main outcome you can expect is that the promised savings won't materialize . . .
No one "cares about the debt".At least no one who is in a position of power to do something about it.And those who DO care about the debt aren't in a position where they can do anything about it...
