#TrumpBudget

This week on Off-Kilter, we break down the latest Trump budget with CAP’s Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts, and Bobby Kogan, chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Another year, another Trump budget. While presidential budget proposals don’t become law, they do offer a dollars-and-cents accounting of a president’s priorities, with many referring to them as “moral documents.” But in an election year like the one we’re all struggling to make it through right now, an incumbent president’s final budget proposal is particularly important and telling, as a roadmap for what they’ll do if they get a second term. To help us dig through the myriad charts and tables and unpack what we most need to know from this year’s Trump budget, Off-Kilter sat down with three of our favorite budget nerds. First: Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts from the Center for American Progress econ and budget squad. And later in the show: Bobby Kogan, the chief mathematician of the Senate budget committee and a prodigious creator and tweeter of budget graphics, who somehow got permission to leave the windowless room he’s usually locked in analyzing budget tables to finally come on the show.

This week’s guests:

• Seth Hanlon, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (@SethHanlon)
• Lily Roberts, director of economic mobility at the Center for American Progress (@LilyRoberts12)
• Bobby Kogan, chief mathematician at the Senate Budget Committee (@bbkogan)

For more on the Trump Budget:

• Check out this handy tweet thread from Bobby and the Senate Budget Committee summarizing the budget and some of its cruelest cuts, and follow @bbkogan for lots more where that came from, plus ongoing updates
• For a deeper dive into the numbers (and lots of helpful graphics), here are some more resources and analyses from our friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Some more budget reads:
• Jeff Stein, Washington Post: “Trump proposes $4.8 trillion election year budget with big domestic cuts”
• Aaron Rupar, Vox dot com: “Trump vowed not to cut Social Security and Medicare — hours before proposing just that”
• Elena Botella for Forbes: “What seniors need to know about Trump’s 2020 federal budget”
• Jake Johnson, Common Dreams: “Trump budget to propose ‘savage’ cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while hiking Pentagon and wall funds”
• Rev. William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson Hargrave in The Nation: “Budgets Don’t Lie, but Trump and His Enablers Do”

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Another year, another Trump budget. While presidential budget proposals don’t become law, as you know, they do offer a dollars and cents accounting of a president’s priorities, with many referring to them as moral documents as a result. But in an election year like the one we’re all struggling to make it through right now, an incumbent president’s final budget proposal is particularly important and telling as a roadmap for what they’ll do if they get a second term. To help me dig through the myriad charts and tables of this year’s Trump budget to digest what we most need to know from it, I sat down with three of my favorite budget nerds for this episode: First, Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts from the Center for American Progress Econ and Budget Squad, and later in the show, Bobby Kogan, the chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee and a prodigious creator and tweeter of budget graphics, who somehow got permission to leave the windowless room he’s usually locked in analyzing budget tables to finally come on the show. But first, my conversation with Seth and Lily. Let’s take a listen.

Seth Hanlon, Lily Roberts, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

LILY ROBERTS: Thanks for having us!

SETH HANLON: Yeah, thanks for having us.

VALLAS: And you guys are my favorite budget dynamic duo. It feels like it’s 2019 all over again.

ROBERTS: Can we get like a theme song, like a superhero cape like Budget Squad?!

VALLAS: You kind of need it, right? Like walk up music.

ROBERTS: [laughs]

VALLAS: Yeah. All right. Well, we’re gonna work on that, OK, for next time you guys come on. So, man, there’s a lot to talk about in this year’s budget, as there always is. But it feels like, in some ways, almost even more than usual, given the political backdrop of this election year. Seth, I want to go to you first to sort of give us a big picture understanding of what’s in this budget.

HANLON: Sure, Rebecca, so. Right. So, this is the final Trump budget before the election. So, I think particularly important to look at as a signal of what Trump’s priorities are and what he would do if he gets another term in office. And I think there’s a lot alarming in it. And so, people say budgets are moral documents. And I think that’s 100 percent true. The budget is really a statement of vision and priorities, and the priorities are very clear in this budget. And I think the main thing is there are tax cuts. There are large tax cuts, more tax cuts that go disproportionately to the wealthy on top of the tax cuts that President Trump signed into law three years ago. And those tax cuts are paid for by cuts, in many cases, devastating cuts to programs that serve average Americans, and in particular, serve the most vulnerable.

VALLAS: And I want to just sort of provide some context as you’re describing this. Trump, as the budget was rolling out, tweeted yet again, his promise never to touch Social Security, right, which also goes along with his previous promises not to touch Medicare and Medicaid, things that many voters really cited as reasons why they viewed him as their best choice in 2016. But that’s the opposite, yet again, of what this budget tells us he wants to do.

HANLON: Absolutely. So, I mean, just to go into the background: so ,Trump ran in 2015 and 2016 categorically promising — and he tried to distance himself from sort of traditional Republican orthodoxy — and categorically promised, “I will never cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.” And he said it over and over again. And I think it’s one of the reasons people saw him, at least some people saw him, as kind of a different kind of Republican. Now, so, immediately when he came into office in his first budget, he broke that promise, and he’s been trampling over that promise ever since. And this budget is no different. So, just to go through it. So, I think the cruelest and the harshest cuts are to Medicaid. And Medicaid, of course, is a program that serves tens of millions of low-income families, and it also serves millions of seniors because it pays for long-term care. So, this Trump budget cuts Medicaid by $920 billion. That’s part of about 1 trillion in overall cuts because he also cuts the Affordable Care Act, which helps people afford health coverage. And unbelievably, President Trump’s Medicare director just a couple of days ago —

VALLAS: Seema Verma.

HANLON: Seem Verma, right, right.

VALLAS: Probably someone that listeners are familiar with, so I feel like she deserves to be named.

HANLON: OK. Got it.

VALLAS: One of the villains of this administration.

HANLON: Administrator Verma tweeted, “No, the Trump administration is not cutting Medicaid.” And like literally two days later, their budget proposal rolls out where they’re proposing to cut $920 billion from Medicaid.

So, and then on Social Security and Medicare as well. On Medicare, we see there’s about $500 billion in cuts to Medicare in this budget. And another broken promise: He had promised to allow Medicare to lower costs by letting Medicare negotiate down the price of prescription drugs so that they’re not astronomically higher than they are in other countries. But the budget doesn’t do that. And Trump has actually threatened to veto the House legislation that would actually lower drug prices through negotiations. And then on Social Security, the budget, just like past Trump budgets, cuts Social Security by about $25 billion, with that money coming out of the Social Security Disability Insurance program.

And the Trump administration has said, well, that’s not really Social Security. That’s not a core part of Social Security, which is just unbelievable. I mean, so people pay into Social Security, too, and they earn benefits, which are both for the continuity of retirement and the contingency of disability. And it’s the same program. And Trump is cutting it by $25 billion, just directly contradicting his repeated promises never to touch Social Security.

VALLAS: There’s a lot that you just put on the table there. So, I want to walk through a couple of those different pieces and really kind of be concrete about them. So, going back to Medicaid for a second — And you mentioned that Seema Verma tweet which got lots of us really riled up because it’s such, she was really, frankly, part of a broader media blitz, right? Looked like the administration, had kind of sent her out to kind of talk to folks. She did an op ed in [00:06:44]The [0.0s] Washington Post. This was like part of a big push to basically tell the American people no, we’re not cutting Medicaid. And you’re right, it comes right at the same time that this budget cutting 900-x billion from Medicaid drops. But it also comes as the administration is actually already cutting Medicaid, right?! It’s not about what they are telling us they’re going to do in their budget. It’s about what they’re actually doing right now by fiat in two separate ways, one of which, of course, is taking Medicaid away from people who can’t find steady work or get enough hours at their job. But it’s also now this new promise of Medicaid block grants, right? Which is just another way to dismantle the program and take health insurance away from people. So, just want to underscore that.

Now, on Social Security, the same thing is happening, right? It’s not just about what he’s promising to do in his budget yet again. He’s also, as we speak, cutting Social Security Disability benefits, right, in a way that will cut hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities off of the lifeline that literally, in many cases, keeps them alive. So, we’re watching this kind of two-front proof point right from Trump of what he wants to do and is doing to these programs. And yet somehow, it still seems like it’s up for debate among some in the media about whether he’s breaking this promise!

HANLON: Yeah. No. Absolutely. And so, yeah, to clarify, and I think you did it really well, the budget when we talk about Trump’s budget, this is his budget request. So, this is what he’s asking Congress to do through legislation. So, it’s not the actual policies that are going to go into effect now. But like you said, the actual things they’re doing with their administrative authority go in the same direction. So, the Medicaid block grants is one example. And I think it’s sort of ironic. They say, well, we’re just block granting the program. And that just means sending money in one block to states for them to administer the program. And so, they would say, though, that’s not cutting the program. We’re just block granting the program. But then if you look at dozens of programs in this budget that are block grants. So, in the community development block grant, right, for example, those block grant programs are the sort of easiest to cut because it’s sort of just a lump sum that goes to states. It’s not like you’re cutting, you’re directly cutting benefits. You’re sort of like starving the programs so that the states can cut benefits. So, there’s all of the programs that are block grants, not all, but like a lot of the programs that are block grants in the Trump budget, they cut. So, it just sort of shows block grants is really another word for cuts.

VALLAS: Yeah. And TANF’s another great example that listeners are probably familiar with, right?

HANLON: Yeah.

VALLAS: You flat fund a program, you starve it of the resources it needs, and then states are the ones that have to make hard choices, right? And you can say you didn’t cut the program, but you set it up to be dismantled is basically what happens.

HANLON: Yep.

VALLAS: And I want to stick with health care for one more moment, and then Lily, I want to bring you in. But Seth, you tweeted something that, to me, is just such an important point about this budget. And it actually starts to get to one of the questions I should ask, which is what’s not in this budget, right? And your tweet, which I want to read here, also going into health care, you write, “Four years after promising a fantastic plan that would, ‘cover everyone,’ three years after trying to tear down the Affordable Care Act in Congress, and nine days before the Supreme Court meets on the Trump-backed lawsuit to repeal the ACA, the Trump administration,” and you’re talking about this budget, “admits it has no healthcare plan!” Right? So, that’s sort of flying under the radar.

HANLON: Yeah, no, absolutely! Absolutely. And they’ve been, you know, so, everything the Trump administration has done since it has come into office is to tear down everything President Obama built, right? So, the Affordable Care Act has covered 20 million people, and the Trump administration has come from all angles trying to repeal it in its entirety with nothing to replace it. So, they’ve had these vague promises that they’re going to have a fantastic healthcare plan that’s going to cover preexisting conditions. And yet they’re waging an all-out assault, both in Congress, through administrative actions, and also in the courts, to essentially dismantle the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. And the lawsuit is the sort of latest and probably most threatening example of that. This is a lawsuit brought originally by the state of Texas to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, every single provision from the protections for preexisting conditions to the extension of tax credit subsidies, through the extension of Medicaid, people being able to stay on their parents’ plans through age 26, every good thing that the Affordable Care Act does and everything that is protecting people right now.

A judge in Texas decided to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act based on just an absurd legal rationale, and that decision has been stayed. So, it’s not in effect now, but now it’s gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. And actually next week, the Supreme Court is having a conference, like an internal conference, to decide whether to take that case. And the Trump administration, the Trump Justice Department, has gotten fully on board in support of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. So, if this lawsuit succeeds, and there’s certainly a chance with these courts that it will, the Affordable Care Act gets struck down in its entirety. People, millions of people are thrown off healthcare. And then the question is, then what happens?

And so, the members of the House had Trump’s OMB director up yesterday. And there’s a line in the budget that just says, “the president’s healthcare vision.” And that’s all it says, right? Like literally, that is all that they say about their plan to replace the healthcare for the 20 million people that have lost it.

VALLAS: Five words that just sort of say, like “TBD.”

HANLON: Right.

VALLAS: That’s kind of what I’m hearing here. That’s unbelievable.

HANLON: And the OMB director says, he was asked about this in Congress, and he says the president’s working on his own plan he’s not yet ready to reveal. I mean, this is the fourth year of his administration. They were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act in Congress three years ago. This is an imminent threat. And I think it obviously shows the disregard that President Trump and his administration have for people’s healthcare and health security. They have no plan to protect preexisting conditions or to cover the 20 million people that would be thrown off insurance if their own, the lawsuit that they back, succeeds.

VALLAS: [huge inhalation] I’m going to take some deep breaths just after all of that and suggest that you do the same, listeners and also Seth and Lily, you too. We’ll take a deep breath. So, the president’s working on his own plan he’s not yet ready to reveal. Well, I am deeply excited to see what that plan is when he is ready to reveal.

HANLON: I’m sure he’s working very hard.

ROBERTS: [laughs]

VALLAS: I’m sure he’s working very, very hard.

HANLON: I’m sure he’s got all the, you know, he’s got his spreadsheets open, and he’s digging deep into the details. I am sure.

VALLAS: That’s an image I now am going to have in my mind for the rest of the day. So, Lily, I want to bring you in, because Seth has walked through a bunch of what’s going on with the Medicare, the Medicaid, the Social Security side of this budget. But I kind of want to do the infomercial segue: But wait, there’s more, right?! Because there’s so much more that gets eviscerated in this budget that matters to low- and moderate-income Americans. And that’s been a big part of what you’ve been focusing on and digging through these myriad budget tables and whatnot. And it feels like we have to start with SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

ROBERTS: Yeah. So, we started with SNAP because there’s not a lot that’s more viscerally upsetting than just taking food away from people. There’s not a lot of reason to do it from any economic purpose. There’s not a lot of reason to do it because it’s a huge budget line item. There’s literally just the sort of that go-to trope on Twitter that the cruelty is the point, is like this is a really good example of the cruelty is the point. As your listeners probably know, SNAP, which is colloquially known as food stamps, it’s used by about 34 million Americans every month in 2019. And it’s the dollars that we’re talking about are pretty small potatoes…. Sorry for the food pun.

VALLAS: [laughs]

ROBERTS: For families, it’s about a $1.40 per person per meal, which does not go very far, and it’s insufficient for a lot of families. I want to put this in context. I’ve been really just stewing on this poll that came out in the fall of registered voters, a third of whom said that they or an immediate family member had had not enough money to purchase food at some point in the last year. And I just, I have been sitting with that number for a couple of weeks now, and it just, it’s shocking. And the Trump administration touts the stock market and the low unemployment numbers all the time. They did it in the State of the Union last week. They do it in this budget. They do it on Twitter all the time. And what on earth could a good economy be if it’s not everybody being able to buy food?

So, this budget looked at that statistic and the people who are struggling all across the country, and they said, let’s cut $182 billion from SNAP. That’s about 28 percent of SNAP’s budget over the next decade. I mean, there are families who are disproportionately likely to suffer from food insecurity” Black and Latinx families, American Indian families, people in rural areas, older people, people with young kids. It’s all of the groups that are already hurt by this budget. And SNAP is just a gratuitous way to make things more difficult for families.

VALLAS: And it feels like, you know, I was just talking with Seth about how it’s not just about the budget proposals when it comes to Medicaid or when it comes to Social Security, specifically Disability benefits. SNAP is another program that this administration has basically devoted, god knows how many FTE resources to just dismantling in every possible way they can try to exercise administrative authority. So, again, by fiat. And the context being, of course, Trump wanted to see SNAP dismantled in the farm bill, the piece of legislation that authorizes it periodically. He didn’t get his way because a bipartisan Senate decided, no, it’s really important that people have food for all the reasons you just described, Lily, and said, no, we’re going to reject these cuts. And then Trump basically took all the cuts from that piece of legislation that had been rejected, that had been thrown in the trash, picked them up kind of took the crumples out of them and said, ah! This is my agenda for the next couple of years for this program. And that’s what he has spent the past year and a half doing with one proposed regulation after another. And so, again, SNAP, a program that he’s showing us through this budget he wants to continue to dismantle if he gets a second term, but he’s already doing it as we speak. So, in a lot of ways, I guess this is the way he wants to dismantle what’s left of SNAP after his first term.

ROBERTS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just last month, changes that the Trump administration sort of unilaterally made to SNAP when it started going into effect, and it’s one of the dumber sort of possible responses to sort of like the broader economic conditions. Because the thing that they went after is that states historically have been able to provide, they’ve been able to receive waivers if they have areas that have particularly high unemployment. So, even though the overall national unemployment rate is low, there are cities and counties that still have 7 to 10 percent unemployment. Those counties and cities have been able to waive the work requirements, the requirements that people are working for a certain number of hours per week, because it’s just impossible to get a job. Like if you don’t have enough jobs, it’s really silly to address that problem by punishing people further. That worsens the economic conditions of an area. And it’s the kind of thing where we’ve gone about a decade without a recession. If there are parts of the country that start seeing a recession bubble up again, limiting their ability to respond to the economic conditions is very dumb and will only punish people further.

And I want to make the point that we kind of talk about this idea of work requirements, and it shows up a lot of places in the budget. And Rebecca, you do such a good job of framing this as taking food or other benefits away from people who can’t get enough hours, who can’t find a job because there isn’t one available. And I want to make the point also that taking food away does not make somebody get a job. In fact, all of the psychological and behavioral economics research shows that people who are faced with scarcity, or even the worry of scarcity — whether it’s food, whether it’s shelter — they are not able to plan as far ahead as people who are able to feed their families. You know, if you’re just thinking about the next emergency, it’s really hard to proofread your résumé. And I think that’s just such an important point to remember here, that this idea that punishing people by taking away benefits, it just makes it harder for people to get jobs. Which is the opposite of what this budget and the Trump administration purports to want.

VALLAS: I really appreciate you bringing up that point and some of that research, too, because it also is flanked by a lot of the health research, right?

ROBERTS: Yeah.

VALLAS: Which is, and it’s common sense, but apparently needs to get said and said more. But if you have adequate nutrition, you’re going to be healthier, and then you’re going to be better able to work and have earnings right? So, it’s like if we actually are trying to invest in a workforce and do all the things that Trump calls investing in workers or, let’s bring back Paul Ryan, shall we? He called cuts to SNAP “workforce development,” right, as part of his big effort to rebrand those cuts. Kind of like what Seema Verma’s been trying to do with Medicaid, calling it “healthy adult opportunity,” taking away your health insurance is what it really means. Ah, fun with Orwellian Trump terms.

ROBERTS: [chuckles]

VALLAS: But that’s like the first thing we would be doing if we were actually caring about people being able to work, would be making sure they have enough food. And it’s hard for me not to think about some of the austerity cuts over in the UK and what happened there, right, which is what we’re watching Trump try to replicate here. We watched the return of scurvy, right? Victorian era illnesses made a comeback in the UK, right, in pretty significant numbers because people were malnourished. That is what happens when you take food away from them.

ROBERTS: Not to mention the generational outcomes here. Like I was talking about adults looking for jobs before. But we know the outcomes for kids get worse, education wise and then later in life for their health, if they have been deprived of food or shelter or. The budget cuts LIHEAP, which helps people who can’t afford it turn on the heat in the winter. And it’s like, you know what we really are sure of? We’re sure that kids need a warm house to live in.

VALLAS: Yep and seniors and everybody else, right? So, just all the parade of cuts to basic survival programs, right, it just goes on and on. And sticking with you, Lily, for another moment. Another real target in this budget yet again is programs that actually help people get the job training they need, and even some jobs programs like the program that funds AmeriCorps.

ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, AmeriCorps is a staple of social services around the country. A lot of people sort of get into the social sector through AmeriCorps, and it really props up a lot of nonprofits and community organizations around the country. This cuts AmeriCorps. This is sort of the workforce development budget focuses on apprenticeships, which we know do have some good outcomes, I don’t to take away from that, but are incredibly unequal in who’s able to access them and the kind of jobs that they prepare you for. And they often prepare you for very low-wage jobs. So it’s not like this is a magical path to a high-wage job. It’s really putting, it’s just the way that they’ve structured their apprenticeship funding supports industries and not workers.

VALLAS: So, I want to go back to Seth and actually bring you both in on this next question, which is, you know, we started to get into like what’s not in this budget, right? And one of those things is a healthcare plan for after we look at what rises from the ashes of the smoldering ACA. But Trump also has really kind of left out a lot of other key things from this budget, and that’s part of the focus you’ve been bringing, Seth.

HANLON: Yeah. So, I mean, if you just sort of look at the things his administration has said, they don’t put it all in the budget, I think, because they don’t want it on paper and out there for everyone to see. But Trump slipped up a little bit when he was at Davos at the World Economic Forum a couple weeks ago. And he was sort of pressed on the budget deficits that his own tax cuts have created, right, the budget deficits, more than a trillion dollars this year. It’s gone up by almost 50 percent since he came into office, largely because of his own tax cuts. And the host who was pressing him, you know, what are you going to do about these budget deficits? Would you look at entitlement programs? Meaning Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And he said, yeah, absolutely. You know, we’re considering that. That’s on the table for after the election. And he said, he actually said it’s incredibly easy to cut those programs and sort of implied that he’s made the economy so great that people don’t even need, like people will need those programs a lot less nowadays. I mean, it’s sort of the same as how he’s been approaching SNAP and nutrition assistance. So, he’s telegraphed and all of his advisers have telegraphed what’s coming down the pike if there’s another Trump term. And I think it’s very clear that they cut Social Security Disability Insurance, and they cut Medicare in this budget. And they devastate Medicaid in this budget. But the cuts could be on a whole other order of magnitude in the future.

VALLAS: So, we can expect it to actually be even worse than what we’re seeing on the pages of this budget, is basically what you’re saying. They didn’t even quite want to show us their full hand because of how terrifying it would be.

HANLON: I think that, yeah, that’s right. And also, they’re proposing more tax cuts. So, and they’ve said they wanted to do more tax cuts. So, they’re extending the tax cuts they already did. So, it’s another $1.4 trillion of tax cuts skewed to the wealthy. And that’s just from extending because the tax cuts expire. So, that’s just from extending the tax cuts. But they’re also talking about tax cuts 2.0 that they’ve been kind of vague about, and it’s not in the budget. And I think it’s sort of telling it’s not in the budget. But they’re talking about things like more tax cuts for capital gains and additional tax cuts for high-income people. And I’m sure we can expect more proposals for tax cuts for corporations as well.

VALLAS: Well, and hearing you talk a little bit about some of the continued lying on the deficit, right, to recap: Trump creates massive hole in deficit with tax cuts for the wealthy, pretends it doesn’t exist. And one of the core promises he’s made over and over and over again, going right back to when we were all living through that tax debate, was this promise that the tax cuts would pay for themselves, right, because of trickle down and blah, blah, blah.

HANLON: Mmhmm.

VALLAS: And one of the things that jumped out to me as really, really important from this budget in terms of either unintended admissions or things they forgot to scrub because of what they could be understood to mean, is there’s sort of buried in the budget is an admission that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves! That they actually lost a ton of money!

HANLON: Mmhmm.

VALLAS: And that hasn’t been getting a ton of attention.

HANLON: Yeah. No, absolutely. And then Steve Mnuchin was on Capitol Hill yesterday and reiterated, yeah, the tax cuts are paying for themselves, and we’re right on target. And it’s just, you just look at the actual numbers in their budget, and they’re nowhere near on target, the revenue levels in their budget, the baseline revenue levels. So, in other words, what they actually expect and what has actually happened are much lower than they were from before the tax cuts passed. That’s the opposite that they promised. They also promised, and they still promise, that every year we’re going to have, the economy’s going to grow by 3 percent or more. And they promised that, of course two years ago when the tax cuts passed. Haven’t met those targets, haven’t come close to meeting those targets. And the expectation for this year is even less, like around 2 percent or even less, which is sort of the trend growth that we’d always seen even before the tax cuts. So, again, they’re just making stuff up.

VALLAS: So, Mnuchin’s sitting in the chair at the hearings. Someone’s saying, “No, the sky is blue. I’m looking at it on page 83.” And he’s like, “The sky is green, everyone. It’s still green.” That’s basically what’s happening.

HANLON: Yeah. No, absolutely.

VALLAS: So, Lily, sort of stepping back from just the granular minutia of the specific dollars and cents of cuts to programs and yet more tax cuts, tax cuts 2.0 and kind of all the line by line of what’s in this budget, I’d love to sort of step back and ask the question of, OK. And this is going to sound fairly common sense, but it feels like it’s an important lens to bring as we digest these budgets year after year. Who are the winners, and who are the losers? And I ask that question, in particular, thinking about Trump’s repeated promises as a candidate, but also his now sort of crowing throughout the years of this administration about fighting for who he once called the forgotten man and forgotten woman, right? And as recently as in his State of the Union talking about just who’s being helped by this economy, who his policies are supposedly helping? Who are the real winners and losers in this budget? And what would this budget mean for the forgotten man and forgotten woman, and particularly thinking about that Trump base of kind of rural voters, working-class voters, and particularly folks in red states?

ROBERTS: Well, so, I think one of the important things about this budget is that it misdirects you about who the winners and losers are. Over and over, one of the things that this budget does is — I’m trying to come up with la simile here — it’s like they are cutting off your arm and handing you a Band-Aid and hoping that you’re really excited about the Band-Aid. You know, one of the examples: the administration talks pretty frequently about their response to the opioid crisis. This budget has a little blurb about strengthening services for people who are struggling with opioid usage. They’re talking about rural areas. They’re talking about different programs that are focused on opioid use. But meanwhile, they’re cutting Medicaid and every other option you would ever have to have healthcare. And they’re decreasing the likelihood that you can have steady benefits and that you could get access to affordable childcare and affordable housing and all of the other things that we know are the things that actually would support people who are dealing with health crises, or particularly opioid addiction. It’s ridiculous, like they’ve spent so many words on the little tiny things that they think will distract people from the overarching cuts. And I think that’s really important to know.

VALLAS: So, it’s almost more like they’ve cut off your arms and your legs, and then they’ve given you a puppy. Right? [laughs]

ROBERTS: Yeah. Like they just give you a distracting thing that sounds nice but is incredibly small dollars.

VALLAS: Right.

VALLAS: This happens a lot, particularly in the scientific research context where they’re saying, like, we’re going to give $50,000,000! And you’re like, well, $50 million is nothing in the context of a federal budget. You know, it’s why SNAP jumps out and why other programs jump out, where if you cut these things that are overall pretty small dollars, but you’re sort of misdirecting people from the really big cuts that sort of make such a change to how American life is lived.

VALLAS: And the cuts that disproportionately hit people in red states, hit people in rural areas, hit lower-income people, all the people that made up that Trump base, right? So, just something that that community needs to understand rather than looking at Trump’s tweets saying how great everything he’s doing is for them.

In the last minute or so that I have with you to wrap up, I’m going to close with sort of a lightning round of like what are the key takeaways people should have in terms of what this budget means about what a second Trump term would look like. And Seth, I’ll start with you, and then Lily, you’ll get the last word.

HANLON: I mean, I think this is sort of the blueprint. And to draw sort of an analogy, right, like we’ve seen how Trump has behaved since being acquitted, right? And it’s trashing the rule of law, right? So, he’s become emboldened, you know. We’ve seen that he and his administration have become more skilled at using the levers of government to achieve his objectives. And so, this budget is a blueprint for what he wants to do. He wants to pass more tax cut, give more tax cuts to himself and people like him. And he wants to cut the programs that people rely on, especially people who are struggling the most. I mean, I think there’s a huge element of fraudulence in this budget. None of it adds up. So many things are just, like Lily was saying, there’s a lot of sort of shiny object distractions. And then there’s plenty of things that they didn’t put in here or they didn’t spell out in the budget. Because I think they’re just a little bit clever about hiding the ball before the election. But the bottom line is very clear: more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. And the budget shows that this is sort of a bill coming due: You know, major cuts to healthcare, major cuts to education, major cuts to nutrition, investments in R&D, you name it.

VALLAS: And a reminder that people need to stop trusting Trump’s tweets about his plans when it comes to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, right? Because he’s basically saying, who are you going to believe me or your lying eyes, right, when people look at this budget.

HANLON: Absolutely.

VALLAS: And Lily, you’re going to close us out.

ROBERTS: Yeah. So, one of the things that I wanted to make sure that I mentioned while I was here today is that one of the things that I think is the scariest that you can write into about it is changes to how things are measured and how things, sort of what we’re viewing is success. And one of the lines that isn’t getting a lot of attention but is in the budget, in the section for the Department of Commerce, it says the budget provides funding to improve poverty measurement in America. That’s something that has potential impacts for every other program that I’ve talked about and every other program that helps low-income people. It’s basically code for changing the way we take inflation into account in the poverty line. I mean, the poverty line is already ridiculously low. For a family of four, I think it’s $26,000, which it’s hard to imagine feeling like you’re thriving, raising a family of four with $26,000 in any place in the country.

VALLAS: It costs about twice that to live, if you use cost of living calculators.

ROBERTS: Absolutely. And so, the Trump administration has repeatedly stated their intention to change how we measure poverty, which would basically kick people off benefits. It’s yet another way to ignore sort of the science and measurement of who is experiencing poverty and what that means and throw that on its rear end, and instead change their definition of poverty so that they can kick more people off benefits.

VALLAS: Another back door attack.

HANLON: And then they’ll brag about reducing poverty.

ROBERTS: Right. Yeah.

VALLAS: That’s right. It’s actually a brilliant proposal.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

VALLAS: We’ve talked about it a little bit on the show, but not in a while, right? Because it’s this brilliant strategy, brilliant and evil to simultaneously cut a whole bunch of programs that help people make ends meet while getting to pretend that poverty in America has gone down because you measured it differently.

ROBERTS: He did that in the State of the Union. He said that 7 million people had been lifted off of SNAP. It’s like no, no. They weren’t lifted off of SNAP. Your explicit goal was to kick them off of SNAP, which you did. That’s a wild goal to have, but that’s what they’ve done.

VALLAS: Probably the right note to end on. No questions about what we would get from a second Trump term. I’d say the jury is back, and we know. And I really appreciate you guys helping me dig through this mammoth budget this year, again. Lily Roberts and Seth Hanlon are two of the econ and budget nerds at the Econ Budget Squad over at the Center for American Progress. And we’ll go out with some walkout music to make you guys feel better.

ROBERTS: [laughs]

HANLON: Thanks, Rebecca.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More. Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas. [hip hop music break]

Welcome back to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. Continuing our deep dive all episode long into this year’s Trump budget, my next guest, who I’m so thrilled to introduce, is Bobby Kogan. He’s the chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee. You probably already follow him on Twitter, where he is a prodigious creator of budget analysis and graphics. But if you don’t, you are missing out, I assure you. He is @BBKogan on Twitter.

Bobby, I’ve wanted to have you on this show for quite some time. So, I’m just trying to temper my excitement a little bit. Thank you so much for taking the time, especially in a budget week.

BOBBY KOGAN: [laughs] It is my pleasure to be here. Any excuse to get to talk about how bad this budget is, is, I think, a great excuse. And I’m a big fan of yours, so I’m just thrilled to be here.

VALLAS: Well, I said earlier, you sort of got permission to escape your windowless office where you are currently chained, mostly usually chained to a desk in weeks like this, analyzing budget tables. So, I really do appreciate you taking the time. But I recognize you may have a caveat or two you need to offer before we get started.

KOGAN: Yeah, sure. Thanks. Yeah. Just obviously, I’m speaking in my personal capacity. I work at the Senate Budget Committee, and they do a lot of great work. And a lot of the stuff that I’m going to I say, obviously is echoed. But I should say that I have not been given permission to speak on behalf of the committee itself and wouldn’t claim to.

VALLAS: Just didn’t want to get you in trouble while you come on the show.

KOGAN: I very much appreciate it, yeah.

VALLAS: So, Bobby, one of the things that you have done a really fantastic job of year after year with these Trump budgets, and this year is no exception, is to really kind of dig deep and pull out some of the absolute cruelest cuts to programs that help low- and moderate-income families in this country that otherwise get ignored, right? A lot of the focus in budget weeks like this one, and this year is no exception, ends up being on Social Security, on Medicare, on Medicaid, those big three, maybe to some extent on the Affordable Care Act or other things that are kind of in the news. But all these other cuts end up getting sort of ignored. And that’s a big part of what you end up pulling out year after year. So, I wanted to sort of kick this conversation off with maybe the top five or six of the absolute cruelest cuts that aren’t getting any attention in your mind?

KOGAN: Sure. Yeah. I mean, obviously, the SNAP and the Medicaid cuts absolutely need to be talked about, and not to take away from them in any way, shape, or form. But I understand why people focus on the big things. But the president has a line-by-line analysis or line-by-line policy for the entire budget. And we do a lot of really, really important things with the fact that he would zero out something like LIHEAP, which helps people heat their homes during the winter or provide cooling during the summer, make it so you’re literally not dying of heat stroke, completely zeroed out. His enormous housing cuts. So, we do Section 8 where we help really, really impoverished families afford rent, and he cuts those. I can’t remember if it’s somewhere like 30, 40, 25 percent. I mean, just some enormous amount, kicking hundreds of thousands of families out into the street. We also we have a lot of programs to help build new affordable units. CDBG, Home Housing Trust Fund: all completely eliminated. That’s like $56 billion dollars that just won’t go to doing new housing units for vulnerable people. Completely zeros out. The Public Housing Capital Fund, which kind of helps maintain our current public housing units. And huge cuts to the operating fund, which helps actually kind of pay that rent. So, all those are enormous: Head Start cuts out the wazoo. It just…you can’t [laughs]…. I mean, it just shows a completely different understanding of what it means to be a moral person, you know.

VALLAS: A charitable way to put it.

KOGAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a basic disagreement about what it means to be good. And I understand you’re trying to achieve a lot of your goals. But a budget — I’m not the first person to have said this — but a budget is a reflection of your morals. If we had unlimited resources, great. We don’t. So, we are forced to kind of choose what we want to prioritize. And if you have a budget that increases military spending while doing $4 trillion of cuts, overwhelmingly, most of those $4 trillion of cuts are to programs that are for low- or moderate-income people because, hey, that’s what the government does. That’s just I don’t know how to say this other than, you know, what are you doing if you’re doing a huge tax break, huge increase in the military, and just trillions of dollars of cuts to low-income programs?

VALLAS: And something that you’ve also drawn real attention to, you’ve talked a lot about kind of the survival programs that Trump has been on a mission to destroy in which this budget is yet another reminder he’s looking to do not just with the big dollar or big ticket items like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP, but also with programs like WIC, which you also lifted up. Literally food. And we’re talking about like infant formula, a program that primarily provides infant formula to nursing mothers and ensures adequate nutrition for pregnant moms and feed small kids, right? That’s the type of program that Trump is like, eh. This looks like waste to me.

KOGAN: Right. And the wild thing about WIC is that it’s a small and super effective program. It’s traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support because it’s completely incontrovertible that it does what it set out to. I mean, study after study shows that it leads to higher birth rates, higher graduation rates. Like you name it, it does. Whatever you think it’s supposed to do, it does it.

VALLAS: Maternal health, infant health, long-term educational benefits.

KOGAN: All of it. But it’s a relatively small program. It’s only a couple billion dollars a year, which I know sounds a lot probably to the listeners. But I, in my job, often round to the nearest hundred billion. So, it’s a small program. And so, to do cuts off of such a small program, you’re not doing that because you’re looking for the big savings. You’re doing that because you fundamentally don’t support the program. That’s not where the big savings is coming from. And so, if you’re still doing that, I don’t know what to say other than that it’s just it’s not a priority to make sure, it’s not a priority for the president to make sure that pregnant women and newborns are able to have food. That’s just wild.

VALLAS: It’s hard not to repeat over and over the Twitter meme, “The cruelty is the point,” right?

KOGAN: Yeah.

VALLAS: But that’s basically the point you’re making. There aren’t real savings here. So, at that point, you’re actually just willing to inflict cruelty, right? Because you thought that something else was worth spending money on more. And we know what that something is. It’s tax cuts for the wealthy, which this budget is rife with, with doubling down on. Another point that you’ve lifted up and that folks will see in a lot of your tweeting, the Senate budget tweeting, is also cuts to research that often kind of get buried and that aren’t maybe quite as immediate in terms of putting food on the table for families or roofs over the heads for families, but it’s really, really important to health and well-being in other ways.

KOGAN: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. So, the budget’s kind of broken into two categories, which the names will give you the wrong impression, but they’re called discretionary, and they’re called mandatory. And we get the impression like, oh, well, one’s important, one’s not. No, they’re both wildly important. Ignore the names. But the discretionary portion is about, a quarter of that is for low or moderate income, and the rest of it, even though it’s not direct aid to low- and moderate-income families, it’s the stuff that when we think, oh, what does the government do? It’s basically all there.

So, the mandatory side, that’s where the entitlements are. And because we do big entitlements, that’s about, it’s about two thirds of the budget, maybe 60 percent. This remaining third, 40 percent that’s discretionary, despite the fact that it’s smaller, that’s where most when you say, oh, the government kind of does this and that, it’s basically all there, except for with a couple of exceptions. That’s where we make sure that the water we’re drinking is not polluted or contaminated. That’s how we make sure that we’re not polluting the air. It’s where kind of all of our basic government stuff happens. So, that’s where the CDC exists, which the Trump budget calls to destroy. The CDC obviously does huge research on infectious diseases and everything, but also is literally on the front lines of making sure there’s no outbreak. Huge cuts to that. NIH does, obviously everyone knows it does really important research. And also, again, is making sure that, again, you know, huge cuts. The Geological Survey makes sure it’s tracking earthquakes and doing research on that. It’s really important to know when there are, you know, it’s important for us to know about earthquakes. NOAA does our weather service. We put the satellites up, and then they do obviously, storm research as well. It’s important to know when hurricanes are coming and where they’re going to hit and how big they’re going to be. People die in these things. National Science Foundation, that one doesn’t do kind of as much of the preparedness, but it does really, really critical research. EPA, you know, I touched on before. All of these things are getting enormous cuts. What he does to this quote-unquote, “non-defense discretionary” part of the budget, like that’s half of his cuts right there. And whether it’s the low-Income stuff like WIC and Section 8 and all the housing stuff, or whether it’s all of this kind of research and readiness, it just, these are all critical functions that the government does, that if they weren’t doing, we’d be really, we’d be I mean, we’d be way worse off.

And then they’re also the sorts of things that are like, OK, maybe this isn’t research, but this is kind of basic government protection. So, you have the Consumer Product Safety Commission or you have, sorry. You have the Consumer Product Safety Commission or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These are basic making sure that the government is serving the people. And sure enough, those are getting enormous cut,. You know, a quarter, a third. It just…. This is the sort of thing where I think because we’re dealing with such large numbers and such a big thing, people kind of zone out. And they say, oh, well, you have to cut something, you know, blah blah blah. And then once you go through line by line, you realize actually, that program’s really important. Oh, actually, this one’s really important too. Actually, these are all really important programs that would cease to be able to function properly were this budget to be enacted.

VALLAS: Yeah. And I want to also highlight one other particular cut, which we talked about in the previous segment but you actually pointed out. And I had noticed this until you tweeted this, that the Trump administration is apparently so proud of its proposed cuts to Social Security Disability, right, which are estimated to jeopardize benefits for hundreds of thousand, possibly millions of disabled folks receiving those benefits, that it actually lists those cuts on its short list in the budget of major policy initiatives! It’s bragging about it! Like that’s the kind of budget that we’re talking about here, right, in terms of its priorities.

But Bobby, I want to kind of take a step back from some of the line by line, because hearing you talk just now, you raised, I think, the straw man that probably needs to get raised, right? Which is ,when folks are thinking about budgets and particularly for folks who don’t spend as much time with them as you certainly do, there can be this kind of conventional wisdom voice that pops into the head of, well, I mean, I guess we probably had to find cuts somewhere, right? Maybe we just couldn’t afford all these things. And what do you say when someone says that, when someone poses that question in good faith? And particularly in a year and a sequence of years where we’re looking at budgets that make the choices this one makes?

KOGAN: Sure. That’s, yeah, that’s a great question. There are a couple ways that I think we can address that. One of the ways that you could do that is you could say, well, if you really felt that you had to make cuts — and I’ll get to why I’m really not in that camp — but if you really felt that you had to, maybe don’t do a trillion and the half of tax cuts and over $200 billion of military increases. With the biggest military in the world by far, we could destroy the world multiple times over easily. A lot of the military increases are not because of some national security crisis, but instead because the US is a giant hegemon, and we want to continue that kind of power. Or because it’s some sort of compulsive desire to just more, more, more military all the time. So, if you really felt like you needed to find savings, they’re doing more than a trillion and a half in the wrong direction by doing more tax cuts for the rich and more military spending. If you really felt the need to do cuts, just don’t do those. And then you get to really, really, really lessen the cuts.

I will say over 76 percent of what the government does is direct aid to individuals, and the rest of it is either research, infrastructure, or the military. So, people have in their mind, oh, there must be huge amounts of waste. And obviously, you can always do things more efficiently. But again, the vast majority of what we do is a direct transfer payment to people. The government is an enormous kind of redistributive system that takes money from people who can afford it, can afford to give money, and gives it to people who are struggling. If you are cutting the budget by definition, numerically, that’s where a lot of the cuts have to come from. And sure enough, that’s where the cuts largely do come from in the government.

I am not…. OK, going back to your question. There are two other kind of responses that I would have. The first is that, and this is something I really like to drive home. Again, I don’t believe in balanced budgets. I think that that’s, I think they’re wrong-headed for kind of a number of reasons. But if you really, if that’s your thing, you say, oh, gosh, we should really focus on this. I have done an analysis that shows that if you start with the Clinton years where we, in the Clinton years, A, we had a balanced budget, but B, long-term projections. What long-term projections at that time had wrong ideas about healthcare spending and about interest. But knowing what we know now about how things were going to play out, if you take the Clinton year kind of structure, fiscal structure, we were on track for taxes, tax revenue to match spending for forever. So, we had no long-term kind of fiscal gap. How do we have one now? The big change is that we did a lot of tax cuts. We also did some military increases. But right now, in in the fiscal year 2020, over $900 billion is from the Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts. And if you wanted to include all the regular extenders that you did, your breaching a trillion, that you just heard, oh, we’re gonna have a trillion dollar deficit. Well, that’s tax cuts.

So, I just I cannot abide by the idea that, oh, gosh, we got a deficit. We have a deficit because we did a bunch of tax cuts for the rich. I guess we’ll just have to cut spending for the poor. Like that can’t be our answer. You cannot really tell me in earnestness that we created at a deficit by giving tax cuts away, and now our response has to be to cut spending that literally keeps people out of poverty. The government keeps over 30 million people out of poverty every year. That can’t be our response. So, the easy answer is just undo the tax cuts! That’s it. If you’re really, really scared, just undo the tax cuts. Don’t throw people into poverty. Don’t kick people out of their homes. Don’t take their food away. Don’t take their healthcare away. The most basic things in civilization are making sure you have food, shelter, and health. And that’s the vast majority of what the government does. And so, the idea that we have to cut that, that’s just wrongheaded.

Now, I will say finally, I don’t really believe that we need to do a balanced budget regardless, because despite the fact that the federal deficit is increasing and the federal debt is increasing, the net national assets are actually increasing even with those. So, we keep getting richer and richer as a nation. The only real problem is that where that wealth is, it is extremely unequal. And so, we have a lot of people who are really struggling despite the fact that we are getting richer and richer as a nation. But we’re not on an unsustainable path. If you think about the nation as a whole, that is just not borne out in the data.

VALLAS: Well, and I actually want to come back to that point in a minute, because I think it’s also worth clarifying what a balanced budget is and why it’s different at the federal level from in states where it’s often required, if not generally required. But I want to just kind of name that part of what you’re talking about here, right, is actually something that Jared Bernstein often calls the Jared Bernstein Rule. He’s often called it the Jared Bernstein Bobby Kogan Rule, because you guys sort of both do battle on this all the time. And talk about what that rule is. And really at the core of it is deficit hypocrisy.

KOGAN: Yeah, that’s right. And Jared is great. This is definitely the Jared Rule. I am proud to fight alongside with Jared and other people on this.

VALLAS: Jared Bernstein, I should identify, he’s been on the show many times, but he’s one of the senior fellows over at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and was former chief economist to Vice President Biden. So, that being the Jared Bernstein we are talking of here.

KOGAN: Yeah. So, Jared says you don’t get to complain about the deficit if you voted for tax cuts. And that is right! Look, tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. The whole point of tax cuts is to lower tax revenue. That’s what they’re doing. No analysis at all that is worth anything, no matter how far right you find, shows tax cuts paying for themselves. That’s fine. If you want to lower taxes, you can lower taxes. I am against that. But they obviously don’t pay for themselves. So, you have people who claim to care about the deficit who say, oh, gosh, it’s really, really, really important that we have a balanced budget who then vote for a tax cut after tax cut after tax cut after tax cut. Oh, the economy is bad. Let’s vote for a tax cut. Oh, the economy is good. Let’s vote for a tax.

VALLAS: And I want to be clear, the tax cuts you’re talking about are all, of course, really overwhelmingly for the wealthy and for corporations, right, large, wealthy corporations.

KOGAN: Right.

VALLAS: We’re not talking about tax cuts that are overwhelmingly going to the people who are losing their food assistance or their housing or their Medicaid.

KOGAN: Right, right, right. We are not talking about the Earned Income Tax Credit. We’re not talking about the child tax credit. I will say, Republicans have gotten a little more clever in this. They now, in their bills that are overwhelmingly tax cuts for the rich, they give a little treat to other people. And then they say, oh, gosh, we’re helping everyone. You know Bush, President Bush, it was an important thing within his tax cuts to make sure that no one was getting hurt. Everyone got at least a tiny bit so that everyone could kind of not focus on the fact that it obviously was a huge, huge, huge help for the rich and a little bit for other people. But, yeah. I mean, these folks vote for one tax cut for the rich after another after another after another. The deficit is higher because of that. And then they say, gosh! Oh, my goodness! How did the deficit get so high? It’s because spending is going up. Well, OK. Yeah, spending is going up because inflation, because of population growth, because of need. It was set to, you know, whatever. They say, gosh, spending is going up. Now we have to cut spending. And it’s just like you can’t take these people seriously if they increase the deficit again and again and again with tax cuts for the rich and then say, mm. I’m really sorry. I guess we’ll just have to cut Medicaid. I guess we’ll just have to cut Social Security. I guess we’ll just have to cut Medicare. I guess we’ll just have to cut food stamps. It just it’s not a tenable position to be in.

VALLAS: And I want to give credit to Michael Linden, one of our friends as well, who’s coined the term “Deficit Peacocks,” right? Which I think aptly describes the people with that voice that you’re sort of getting to right now. So, you actually came in. You did a little homework for this segment, which I’m honored that you did. And I want to give you the chance to use it. And you did some number crunching that really underscores the point that you’ve been making throughout this conversation so far about how this is all about choices, right? That we didn’t have to cut SNAP by a quarter. We didn’t have to dismantle Medicaid, right, all because of some kind of fiscal imperative, right? These are choices. And what you did was actually to take a look at how we could make different choices within the context of this budget if we took a look at, say, military spending.

One that I’ll kick us off with that folks will remember well and that you and I have used it at various points over the years, is that for the cost of the Trump tax cuts just for the top 1 percent, just the richest 1 percent, what they got in tax cuts under that tax law in 2018, those tax cuts cost more than the entire SNAP program, right?

KOGAN: [heavy sigh].

VALLAS: So, the program that provides $1.40 per person per meal in food assistance and runs out for most people by two to three weeks in the month, that is the program that we can’t afford because oh, my god, deficits, right? But which we could afford to give tax cuts to people to buy a boat to put inside their boat, which is what we can take away from the top 1 percent prioritization there. So, Bobby, I want to see this homework. What different choices could we have made this year?

KOGAN: Well, yours is the best, because obviously, nothing’s more basic than food. Even if you don’t have a home, even if you’re in poor health, if you don’t, eat you’re dead. So, I’m glad you got the right one. But I got ones that are pretty good as well. So, as I said this budget increases the military while cutting other things. And I looked at just what the military increases were. And so, to be clear, if you make the changes that I’m about to say, the top line deficits within the budget would remain unchanged. But using 2022 as an example, it’s the first year where they’re during a big military increase, if they instead of doing that, I think it was a $51 billion base military increase, if they instead of doing that, just put that money into healthcare, they could give 9 or 10 million people who don’t have healthcare, healthcare. Same cost, right? You say, OK, same deficit, same everything. We’re just going to instead of further increasing the military, just leave it at its absurdly high levels, and we’re going to give 10 million more people healthcare.

Same sort of calculation. It’s about, at Medicaid levels, it’s currently about $5,000 per person for healthcare. For Section 8 housing, it’s about $10,000 per person. So, you could do about 5million people. You could help 5 million people live in a home. We have a homelessness crisis. We have a low-income housing crisis. People are struggling to pay rent. And instead of doing $51 billion more of healthcare in that year, we could just help 5 million people or 5 million households afford their rent. That’s a wild decision that they made!

VALLAS: Yeah. And both really underscore those kinds of choices, right, in really kind of human terms. That’s what we’re talking about here. And it’s worth noting, I think, hearing you lay these things out, right, I want to bring back up a really good point that Lily made in the earlier segment, which is that buried in the Trump budget as well, is a continued promise to jury rig how we even measure poverty in this country, right?

KOGAN: Right.

VALLAS: Because they realize that if we see this widespread rise in homelessness and hunger and poverty and all these things that we know this budget is yet another recipe for creating, that is not a good look, right, for an administration. And so, they need to cook the books and make it look like poverty is going down on their watch while also using that as another backdoor way to take these programs away from people and take these forms of help away from people.

So, Bobby, people have spent, I think, probably more time this year on talking about some of these horrible cuts and probably more than I expected, given all the other things that are going on. So, I consider that a win in terms of media coverage of the budget that is the blueprint for a second Trump term. But not nearly as much time, I would think, as is warranted on kind of how this budget cooks the books. And that’s something that you, I think, have spent more time thinking about and decoding than probably most humans. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that. And there’s two primary ways that this budget cooks the books. Walk us through what those two ways are.

KOGAN: Sure. So, I think the bigger thing that they do is they have incredibly unrealistic economic assumptions. Jason Furman, President Obama’s former, kind of chief of, the head of the CEA, the Council of Economic Advisers, had a really great tweet where he was trying to illustrate just how outside the norm his economic assumptions are. The answer is they’re wildly, they’re like a full percentage point. It assumes nearly 3 percent growth for forever. And digging into it, it has to be coming from assumed productivity growth. They have higher labor force growth, but it’s largely in the productivity side. So, what they’re really implying is that we’re going to have sustained productivity growth that we haven’t seen in decades, not temporary, but sustained productivity growth that we haven’t seen in decades. That would be amazing, but no credible people believe that. And by just having year after year after year of really, really, really wildly optimistic assumptions, that itself has huge feedback into the budget.

And so, I did kind of some first order analysis from some of the tools that CBO kind of provides. And by my estimates —

VALLAS: CBO being the Congressional Budget Office, which kind of is a big player in all this.

KOGAN: Right. Right, right, right. Thank you. So, yeah, the Congressional Budget Office kind of gives rules of thumb about how changes in economic assumptions filter back into the budget. And so, I played with fixing. Fixing. I played with kind of putting more in line with what everyone thinks: their productivity assumptions, their labor force assumptions, their inflation assumptions, and their interest assumptions. And by the final year of the budget window, 2030, all of those assumptions that the Trump budget made lead to the deficit being artificially $572 billion lower than it would be, right? So, half a trillion dollars of their savings, quote-unquote — I mean not savings because it’s not policy — but of how they get to where they want to be, is really just from cooking the books and having wildly unrealistic assumptions about. And again, that’s in one year. In each year, they’re giving themselves this huge boost. 471 billion of that is from their productivity assumptions itself. So, again, they just they assume. I mean, and it would be great for America if that were true. But it’s just not realistic. So, that’s kind of one major way that their top line levels and you know, all the Republicans go and defend, they say, great! President Trump is getting us back on track. Well, if you assume 3 percent growth for forever, yeah, that does a lot of the work right there.

The other thing that they went —

VALLAS: And before I get you to the second thing, because this one is just so important, right, and it really is kind of getting buried. It’s also it’s just this like blatant political move because of how much it’s tied to the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, right? And so, it’s the kind of chart — and let’s call it what it is — it’s the kind of lie in this budget document that allows someone like Mnuchin to go into a hearing and say with a straight face to members of Congress, yes, the tax cuts are paying for themselves. They’re right on target. Right? Which we just talked about with Seth Hanlon in the previous segment but is so connected to this point, right? This is that kind of just made up math, right — cooking the books is the right term — that allows this administration and its top spokespeople to continue to spout lies about what is actually happening to the economy and to the deficit as a direct result of that tax law.

KOGAN: Yeah, that’s right. One thing I’ll quickly say, though, is that if you look at their current estimates of revenue as a percent of the economy and compare them to their estimates that they had before the tax cuts were enacted, you’ll notice that their current ones are a lot lower. So, even I totally agree. You’re totally right. They do this so they can say, yeah! See! Look, we’re estimating 3 percent forever because of our policies. Even with that, they still, according to their own numbers, they’re way lower revenues. So, yeah. Great point.

VALLAS: And you were going to go into a second point. So, there’s a second way that the books are cooked, and this gets us back to some of that non-defense discretionary spending.

KOGAN: Right, right, right. So, they [chuckles], the budget is supposed to be a line by line. It’s supposed to be where the president says, this is how much I’m doing on every single program in the country. And the president does that for the first year in the budget for every program. But the budget is a 10-year document. And of course, they make statements about deficits and debt in the 10th year. But they do a bunch of, they do spell out quite a few cuts. But there’s a whole… Hmm. They spell out a bunch of cuts, but they do not spell out close to all of their cuts. What they have as a giant magic asterisk. So, for non-defense discretionary, they are cutting at $1.9 trillion. And they spell out $1.2 trillion of cuts. If you go line by line through all of them and add all of those cuts up, you’ll get 1.2 trillion. But that means that there’s a giant, the way that their spreadsheets work, there’s a giant kind of residual that they have at the very bottom. That’s just extra savings that they couldn’t figure out or they didn’t bother or whatever that they didn’t allocate. And to put this kind of in context, that’s 40 percent of their cuts in the final year.

So, in the final year, by 2030, they say, oh, gosh, we’re achieving this much in non-defense discretionary savings, and they only got 60 percent of the way there. The rest of it’s just a giant magic asterisk, which is A, really, really, really inappropriate. It means that they just kind of gave up or that they’re relying on people not digging into it. But B, it also means that the cuts that they are showing are actually even deeper than they imply. Because if you say, oh, I’m cutting this program by some amount. Oh, but there’s another 40 percent of cuts that need to happen? Well, if I say, oh, I’m cutting Section 8 by $79 billion, that’s great. But there’s another $718 billion magic asterisk. And some of that’s going to go to Section 8. Some of that’s going to go to NIH. Some of that’s going to go to WIC. And so, all of these cuts are actually even deeper. They get away with pretending their cuts are not as deep as they really are, and they get away with pretending that they’ve done quote-unquote “the hard job” or whatever of figuring out what their real policy are. And they didn’t get close!

VALLAS: Yeah. Which is just another through line throughout the budget. When you think about the healthcare piece, which just came up in the previous segment, there’s no healthcare plan in here, right? It’s just sort of a TBD place holder of healthcare: insert vision on healthcare at some point when we figure it out, right? And that’s basically what you’re saying is also a through line with all of these other cuts, right, which are a lot worse than what’s actually shown, if that’s even possible to conceive.

So, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, Bobby — And this time has flown by. I had like eight other questions I wanted to ask you about. We don’t have time. So, I guess that means I’ll just have to have you back.

KOGAN: I’d be glad to come back.

VALLAS: I can’t wait. If I were listening to this conversation with you, I would really hope that the person sitting in my chair right now would ask you the following question. So, I’m going to do it. And that is, what is it like being the chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee? I mean, I think people might be able to get some picture from this conversation of what it is that you do, given your description of some of the analysis and some of the charts and the tables and whatnot. You, when we were walking into the studio, talked about this week as your Super Bowl, [laughing] right? This is like your favorite week of the year, which maybe is unsurprising. But share a little bit about what this job is.

KOGAN: It’s awesome. Well, OK. I should say this. Everyone has different things they like and they dislike. I really like math. I don’t know what — There’s no way to say this without sounding really dorky. But when I was in middle school, I would make up Algebra 1 problems for myself to solve when I was bored. I just like doing math. And so, the fact that I am in a job where I’m basically like a paid math consultant. I don’t know how to make this sounds sexy or good. But the fact that they literally pay me to just kind of do math that I’m good at it is awesome. You know, all the times that my teacher said you’re going to need to do these complicated Algebra 1 word problems for the rest of your life, and I said there’s no way that’s true. Turns out that is exactly true. So, I do a lot of really complicated Algebra 1, and I do a lot of really simple Algebra 2. I do some baby statistics, and then I do a lot of arithmetic. Most of what I do is not, the math isn’t hard. And Harry Stein, who was formerly here in the budget and tax group —

VALLAS: And used to come on the show all the time. I miss Harry.

KOGAN: I miss — Well, actually I get Harry now, so.

VALLAS: Yeah. You stole him!

KOGAN: That’s right. For folks listening, Harry is now the budget econ tax person for Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland and is amazing. You know, Harry made this point yesterday. The actual mechanical math and arithmetic that we tend to do is pretty easy, which means that my job is not stressful. They say, “Okay, Bobby, do this analysis.” And I say, “You got it.” I can do this pretty well. I learned how to do it in middle school. The only thing that’s difficult is trying to isolate and make sure — There are a lot of ways to be 90 percent right. And so, making sure that you’re 100. And 90 percent’s pretty good. It’s an A-minus. But making sure that you’re a 100 percent right is the only kind of difficult thing about it. So, they let me, which is really nice, just play around and try to estimate lots of things. And. Oh, god. How do I do an estimate of this? Oh, well, I should figure out what the moving parts are and try to get estimates of those and, yeah, and then just multiply and divide. [chuckles]

VALLAS: Well, and I think you’re sort of understating some of the challenge of some of what you do given — and we were just talking about this actually as we were walking into the studio — how hard these budget documents can actually be to scrutinize because of how much is hidden for all the reasons you were noting. So, it sounds like that’s really the hard work is sort of being Nancy Drew for the budget.

KOGAN: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. I’ve said to a couple of my colleagues this week excitedly, “You’re a budget sleuth!”

VALLAS: [laughs]

KOGAN: And that’s exactly right: that we get these giant multi-thousand page documents. And combing through them, the first part is saying, oh, I know what this program is. I know where it lives within that. And so, then if it’s a straightforward thing, it’s really easy. Just subtract and divide. Really, really, really cool. But sometimes what they’re doing is really, really unclear. And so, it takes kind of trying to find tons of individual parts of these thousand-page documents, making sure, trying to apply the cuts that we know exist, making sure the numbers then add up to make sure that we’re not accidentally double counting. You know, there are a lot of ways to accidentally do basic arithmetic and basic algebra wrong. And so, that’s, you’re right, that’s definitely where it is. But I don’t know. I remember my first internship I ever had, my second day of that, they had messed up their receipts, and they…. Anyway, they knew how much they’d spent in every month, but they didn’t know which spending went to each month. And so, they’re like, hey, Bobby, can you play with numbers and try to make some of these add up? And I spent all day coming up with tons and tons of different iterations of making that work. And that was my favorite day at that internship where I just kind of played with adding and residuals all day. So, anyway, I’m glad that I’ve ended up in something that lets me kind of dork out all day.

VALLAS: Well, I’m glad that you did as well, because you’re doing this all a service by doing the algebra and the arithmetic that some of us, by the way, have a harder time with than you do, even though we learned it in middle school, too.

KOGAN: Well, I don’t know how to read. So, you know, I think that it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

VALLAS: [laughs] Bobbie Kogan is the chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee. He’s also on Twitter @BBKogan. That’s B-B-K-O-G-A-N. As I’ve said, worth the follow because you would get lots of this nerding and lots of it in chart and graphic form. Bobby, thank you so much for pulling yourself off the Hill to come over and hang out with me a little bit and talk budget. And I am holding you to it. I’m going to have you back soon.

KOGAN: Thanks for having me on, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪