NEW YORK – As America’s crucial presidential election approaches, the campaign has reached a fever pitch, with Donald Trump and his cronies issuing increasingly radical promises of what they would do with power. But such promises, for example regarding fiscal policy, inevitably will be broken. After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously.
Some of the Trump campaign’s more absurd promises come from Elon Musk, who claims to know how to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. This is quite rich coming from someone whose companies depend so much on government contracts and bailouts (without the $465 million loan that it received from the Obama administration, Tesla might well have gone under).
Musk’s claims betray a startling ignorance of both economics and politics. His proposals amount to a cut of around one-third of all government expenditures – eight times more than what the General Accountability Office (the government’s internal watchdog) estimates to constitute waste or fraud. Among other things, the US would have to cut all “discretionary” spending, including on defense, health, education, and the Departments of Treasury and Commerce, as well as slashing Social Security, Medicare, and other well-established, overwhelmingly popular programs.
Such savage cuts imply that Trump would try to persuade Congress to make major changes to these programs. But don’t hold your breath. Trump already had four years to dismantle the “administrative state” when he was president, and he didn’t deliver. Now he is making populist promises that would add (not subtract) to the deficit – more than $7.5 trillion in the coming decade.
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