Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

House Budget demands major Medicare and Social Security cuts to seniors receiving benefits

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s push to increase the debt ceiling before funding ends in October is threatened unless Trump makes major reductions to retirement programs. Mnuchin has called for the House to pass a clean bill to increase the debt ceiling without riders and amendments to make spending cuts to retirement programs

Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, a former Republican congressman and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus who was brought into the White House, in part, to help influence how conservatives would vote on key issues, has told Mnuchin there will be no vote to approve an increase in the Federal deficit until Trump agrees to reign in the out of control spending on the elderly.

Some White House and Treasury officials were incensed to see Mulvaney break ranks, said several people involved in internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. So you have an administration fighting with itself, and Congress may end up fighting with itself as well, as the leadership tries to just increase the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophe while conservative members try to use that specter as a way to extract policy concessions.

What should be easy, because Republicans have total control of government, becomes excruciatingly hard.

Today the House Budget Committee released a blueprint of the House budget, and in many ways it’s analogous to what gave them such difficulty on health care: It includes savage cuts to domestic programs that are politically perilous and will cause reservations among House moderates and threaten the bill’s chances in the Senate, yet are nonetheless decried by House conservatives as not cruel enough, all justified using unrealistic predictions about the future. Mike Debonis reports:

Like the spending blueprint released this year by President Trump, the House plan envisions major cuts to federal spending over the coming decade, bringing the budget into balance by relying on accelerated economic growth to boost revenue.

Unlike Trump’s budget, the House proposal make major cuts into Medicare and Social Security — entitlement programs that the president has pledged to preserve. The House plan also makes a less-rosy economic growth assumption of 2.6 percent versus the 3 percent eyed by the Trump administration. Both, however, exceed the 1.9 percent figure used by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in its most recent economic estimates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-gop-unveils-budget-plan-that-attaches-major-spending-cuts-to-coming-tax-reform-bill/2017/07/18/6e68b679-c63a-4dd1-a3da-e191636946ad_story.html