More Than Half of Trump's Budget Is Just Stealing From Poor and Middle-Income People

The budget proposal that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney made up for Donald Trump gets more than half of its cuts from programs that support low- and middle-income people, according to a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

All told, 59 percent of its cuts hit programs that non-wealthy people rely on to do things like see doctors, pay their heating bills, and keep their kids fed.

In order to shrink down the size of government, or in order to create the impression of shrinking the government while actually facilitating massive tax cuts for millionaires, multimillionaires, and billionaires, the proposed budget reduces discretionary spending by doing things like eliminating housing vouchers for more than 250,000 low-income households, further cutting into Medicaid, and reducing funding for food stamps by a staggering $193 billion.

This is both cruel and entirely out of proportion to the percentage of federal spending that actually goes to programs for the poor and working class, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (emphasis mine):

Altogether, the budget proposes $4.3 trillion in non-defense cuts through 2027. This means its $2.5 trillion in cuts to programs assisting low- and moderate-income people would constitute about 59 percent of the total non-defense cuts, even though these programs account for just 29 percent of non-defense spending and just 24 percent of total program spending.

The analysis even comes with a handy little nutrition label, if the cereal you were eating was called Class War Crunch and the mascot was maybe a very hungry child with an empty cereal bowl or a person on disability being evicted from their home over a missed rent payment.

Last week, Mulvaney said that the White House would stop measuring compassion by the number of people on social service programs and start measuring it by the number of people pushed off those programs.