Trump's Budget Director

this is what they were talking about on bloomberg.  it looks like it will be an interesting dynamic between trump and this guy mulvaney.  trump appears to be like most republicans who think money grows on trees and deficits don't matter (and debt can be ignored) when republicans are in charge. 

when trump talks about spending on infrastructure (which does make sense, just as obama wanted to), increasing spending on the military (which is a f*cking ridiculous handout in my opinion), not touching social security or medicare (which doesn't seem sustainable) and of course topping all that massive spending off with tax cuts for the rich and corporations, that obviously leads to massive increases in the deficit and debt.

of course trump talks about increasing growth from 2% to 4% which would help the problem but no one knows how that is going to happen.

however, this mulvaney guy seems to understand that trump's ideas are nonsense, if you actually care about deficits and debts, which he knows are problems.

of course, there's always congress but those guys are almost completely useless.

so, who knows how all this will go. 


here's the article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/us/politics/budget-deficit-trump.html?_r=0

I listen to Peter Schiff a lot and he basically says the same thing about the budget deficit and it being unsustainable. He's a big believer in another bubble looming in the not to distant future. 

to be fair, of course, trump is inheriting a big problem here, just as obama did.   so, the question won't be why we have these problems, but what trump is able to do to try and deal with him.  but, also to be fair, unlike obama, trump and republicans have complete control over the government so if they actually want to address this problem and can figure out how, they should be able to do it. 


these are old problems, but no one seems to want to do anything meaningful about them. 

yes, it's hard to touch social security and medicare because that affects so many people.  those are literal entitlements, i.e. i paid money towards those programs out of my paycheck for so long, i am truly entitled to my money back.  just like the bank probably feels they are entitled to a mortgage payment every month since they loaned me money to buy a house.


it's hard to touch military spending because that's the ticket to big money and power.  no one wants to bite the hand that pays for ridiculously expensive campaigns.  also, if you only spend $400 billion a year on military garbage we don't need rather than $600 billion per year, people will call you weak and say you hate america (rather than you hate debt) and a lot of people will believe that.

but trump would be the perfect guy to do something about this stuff.  first, since he has a republican congress, he won't run into the same problems a democrat would (or vice versa).  certainly he won't have a brick wall like obama did.  and two, since he's the non-politician, he doesn't owe anyone anything, as we are told although who really knows what and who he owes. 

but if he took these unpopular moves and lost in 4 years to some career politician, he can go out as the underdog who did things differently and made the tough decisions and years later, he'll be seen as a good president who helped attack the debt and deficit problems no one else did.  it's perfectly set up for him. 

just came across these numbers.  i have no idea how accurate they are but they do seem to have the categories covered.  most people don't understand what a simple deportation entails.

anyway, the only obvious problem i see is that tripling ICE deportation officers for $6.6 billion won't be a drop in the bucket for what is needed for truly mass deportations.

anyway, if trump is serious about this kind of thing, i'm afraid to think what the deficit will look like in the near future. 


https://medium.com/@CAPAction/the-cost-of-trumps-mass-deportation-plan-b1ead4f91e62#.txfhx3b3e