Jacobin
Branko Marcetic
04/24/2019
Last month, Trump submitted yet another budget that pairs sky-high military spending with severe cuts to the rest of the government. Trump wants to use a budget gimmick to raise military spending to a colossal $750 billion; at the same time, supposedly concerned by the deficit, Trump is looking to cut domestic spending $2.7 trillion over ten years, slashing Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, student loan programs, and funding for the EPA and most other government departments — even, at one point, gutting the Special Olympics. Bernie Sanders called it “breathtaking in its degree of cruelty.”
As usual, Trump’s budget request escalates a Washington tradition of turbo-charging military spending while demanding austerity from everyone else — and this at a time when the public is clamoring for public action on health care, climate change, and the opioid crisis. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic spoke with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, to discuss these lopsided budget priorities — including how to cut the government’s gargantuan military spending and what that money could be directed to instead.
