Connection to Economics: In the Budget, the government faces trade-offs as they have to decrease one department’s budget if they want to increase another department’s budget. Since there is scarcity, there will never be enough money to increase all the department’s budget to make them happy, so the government needs to make trade-offs.
Questions:
Questions:
- Do you agree with where Trump cut or increased spending? What would you have done differently? Why?
- What do you think about what Trump chose to do with DACA? How do you think that will work out for Trump and the Republicans?
Article link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-budget-would-slash-spending-domestic-programs-entitlements-n847141
6 comments:
I, like many of the people on this blog, have different ideals than Trump and thus disagree with where his priorities are. I think the wall is stupid, doomed to fail, and a waste of money. I think the increase of immigration restrictions is hurting California's economy, especially in regard to farming. I also think our military has enough spending already. I don't completely understand how he's increased infrastructure in the budget but decreased funding for urban development. From a more objective standpoint, I see the appeal; he's carrying out a lot of the things he promised, even if he campaigned on not using American tax dollars to build the wall.
The 2019 budget for me is similar to how I feel with a lot of Trump's initiatives: two steps forward, and a car accident back. Specifically, the two steps forward for me would be the slashing of entitlement spending and the reduction of the budgets of federal Departments such as the DoL and HUD. The car accident backwards? The increase in defense funding, which, while being par for the course for Republican administrations, is a disaster for any fans of a balanced budget.
The dramatic increase of unnecessary military spending (which runs parallel to the Republican foreign policy doctrine of peace through force) runs counter to the key fiscally conservative value of not spending more than you make. Indeed, the 2019 budget isn't a balanced budget, as the government will have a budget defect of 984 billion dollars, based off of the OMB Budget Report.
I would use this opportunity to not only present a balanced budget to Congress (or even a budget that would present a budget surplus) but to present a Constitutional Balanced Budget amendment and try to push that as a major legislative proposal. Every state save for Vermont has a balanced budget amendment, so I could see this amendment actually passing through the State Houses.
While I'm happy that Trump is spending money on important things like Veterans Affairs and badly needed infrastructure, I don't think that it's a good idea to leave so much of the budget solely to the states. I commend his efforts, but they still fall short of what this country really needs. He leaves lots of policy up to the states, and gives very little direction or guidelines for the states to follow. Additionally, immigration is an incredibly important issue, and needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Military spending is still one of the biggest drains to the budget, while it could be used for other services such as the environment and reducing the federal deficit. Overall, the tax plan is not a great response to many of the issues facing the United States.
I don’t agree with Trump’s decision to increase defense spending, as it seems rather wasteful and unnecessary to me. Although this wasn’t mentioned in the article, the 2019 budget also includes significant cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in preparation to eliminating them altogether, which will be greatly detrimental to arts and humanities programs across the country. Maintaining funding for these programs (which, combined, take up a very small portion of the governmental budget), along with other domestic programs, would be a more worthwhile endeavor than bolstering military funding. However, I’m not particularly surprised by the composition of the 2019 budget, as much of his political priorities/campaign promises are reflected in it -- specifically, the increases on funding for border wall/security and immigration enforcement.
I disagree with Trump's decision to increase spending on the military. We already spend the the most money in Western Hemisphere on the military and should be looking to expand. There are a plethora of problems that need fixing and cutting funds to them is not a public service.
I believe that Trump should not increase the defense budget. In my opinion, it is already big enough, and spending more money on the military to me seems pointless considering we spend so much on it already. Rather, I think we can either save some money or put some of that defense spending to other areas which I think need more attention, like Medicaid and Medicare, which Trump is also cutting. I also don't understand why Trump would spend any money on the wall; what will it realistically do that is worth our spending so much on? However, I do like his plan of increasing the spending on infrastructure. I think that this is a great way to not only fix the current infrastructure, which definitely needs work, but will create jobs and help boost the economy.
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