#TrumpBudget: Part Deux

Rebecca talks with CAP budget gurus Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts about Part Deux of Trump’s Cruelty Olympics, aka his budget proposal— and Indivisible’s Chad Bolt returns for another installment of ICYMI. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter: For better or maybe for worse… Part II of Trump’s FY2020 budget blueprint is now out in the world. So Rebecca brings in two of the budget gurus from the Center for American Progress — Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts — to help count down some of the most egregious proposals buried in Trump’s budget.

But first, Indivisible’s Chad Bolt returns to help Rebecca sort through the good, the bad & the ugly of the week’s biggest stories in poverty and inequality, ICYMI — from the flooding in the Midwest to how Trump’s proposed SNAP cuts are the real job killer, to Utah passing “clean slate” automated criminal record-clearing legislation and more.

This week’s guests:

• Seth Hanlon, senior fellow, Center for American Progress
• Lily Roberts, director of economic mobility, Center for American Progress
• Chad Bolt, associate policy director, Indivisible

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas, and with mercury still in retrograde part two of Trump’s budget is now out in the world for better or maybe for worse. So we at Off Kilter are bringing in two of the budget gurus from the Center for American Progress, Seth Hanlon and Lily Roberts to help me count down some of the most egregious proposals buried in Trump’s cruel budget.

But first, Chad Bolt, Chad.

CHAD BOLT: Here I am.

VALLAS: Here you are, you are, you’re here.

BOLT: Back again.

VALLAS: What’s going on with you?

BOLT: Well, it’s almost tax season, I mean it is tax season but the deadline’s fast approaching, have you done your taxes yet?

VALLAS: You are so on brand always, can I just tell you that? Do you, serious question, do you have advent calendar that’s a countdown to tax day?

BOLT: Absolutely not, I don’t what would give you that suggestion about me but I did do my taxes this past weekend so that’s why it’s on my mind.

VALLAS: I so didn’t.

BOLT: Well you’ve got another couple weeks here.

VALLAS: I don’t even want to talk about it, this is one of the things I’m worst at doing but I am picturing you now with the advent calendar and I sort of feel like as I was asking you that question your eyes shifted like six times in mysterious ways that made me think —

BOLT: Maybe I should have one.

VALLAS: Or maybe you do have one secretly and you’ve already eaten all the chocolates out of it so now you’re very ready for tax day because there’s no chocolate left in the advent calendar.

BOLT: OK there’s no truth to that but I will say I was at home where I grew up, in Harrisburg Pennsylvania this weekend, and —

VALLAS: I always forget that you grew up in Harrisburg.

BOLT: Indeed.

VALLAS: Also known as H-Vegas.

BOLT: Is it? I’ve never heard that growing up in Harrisburg but I did have —

VALLAS: People are saying.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: Are they? I did have a lovely central Pennsylvania spring treat this weekend which is chocolate peanut butter eggs.

VALLAS: Oh, that sounds delicious.

BOLT: Yes, they are amazing I will bring some back for you next time I go home.

VALLAS: I was going to say wait, you didn’t bring them back for me? Is that the rest of that sentence?

BOLT: I know it actually turned into a terrible story.

VALLAS: It really did.

BOLT: Because I didn’t bring any to share with the class.

VALLAS: But Harrisburg, that makes sense because that’s Hersey-Land.

BOLT: Mhm.

VALLAS: So lots to talk about there.

BOLT: Yes, and it’s a big spring fundraiser thing that people do, they sell chocolate peanut butter eggs around Easter time.

VALLAS: Do you know a thing that people also do in Harrisburg?

BOLT: Gosh, there’s so many possibilities.

VALLAS: Also has to do with chocolate.

BOLT: Oh, they go to Hersey Park?

VALLAS: They bathe in chocolate. Do you know that this is a thing you can do in the proximity of Hersey, you can actually go to spas that are chocolate spas and submerge yourself in melted chocolate.

BOLT: Yes, that I have heard, there are also the street lights in Hersey are alternating wrapped and unwrapped Hersey Kisses.

VALLAS: Wait, really? I didn’t know that.

BOLT: Indeed, yes in Downtown Hersey.

VALLAS: Well next time you’re going take me but also bring me back chocolate.

BOLT: Will do.

VALLAS: So Chad we’re supposed to actually talk about things that are going on in the world and much as you’re trying to make everything about tax season I’m actually going to take us out of that for one week because there are things that have been going on in congress that we are overdue talking about, particularly because last week we focused entirely on week one of the budget, you and me. One of those things has to do with paid leave, we’ve got Republicans, I’m actually taking a look first at what’s going on in Congress even though we’re actually in a recess week right now but there’s some stuff that people need to be aware of. A bunch of Republicans who are out there saying that they’ve got this big bold proposal on paid leave. What’s going on there?

BOLT: Yeah so I think I’ll talk a little about what it is and what I think it means. So Senator Ernst and Senator Lee have a new bill that they introduced. Again it is a fake paid leave proposal and that is for a number of reasons but what it boils down to is that this is a paid leave proposal that is only good for parents and children and what it forces workers to do is choose between having paid leave now and their retirement security later. It essentially says oh you need paid leave now? Great, put off retirement later, put off collecting Social Security later and you can have paid leave now. It is not helpful for workers to have to choose between paid leave and raiding their own Social Security.

VALLAS: And that’s effectively what this bill would do. It says to current you hey, how do you feel about screwing over future you? Oh that sounds good? That’s what this proposal would do.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. What I think it means is that the appetite across the board for some kind of serious paid leave proposal is so strong and that it’s so popular and people really want this, they’ve realized that OK we need to put something out there even if it’s just a token gesture at trying to get at the policy problem people want congress to tackle. And even if it’s really not going for workers, this isn’t but we have reached the point in the conversation about paid leave where Republicans are acknowledging that they need to come to the table with something and of course they’ve also done this with equal pay for equal work, they’ve got fake versions of that as well but they’ve realized that it is a popular enough idea and that the moment is past due in coming up with some way to do it that they are putting together these fake proposals to at least pretend that they’re making an effort on it.

VALLAS: But the answer of course is not to let them get away with these fake proposals, it’s to cut through them to see if what they’re doing is putting forth good talking points that aren’t backed up by good policy because they realize that the public conscious isn’t a place where people are demanding these answers from people no matter which side of the aisle they happen to work on. But we need to be pushing through and say does this actually meet basic tests. You’re telling me this proposal absolutely doesn’t, both based on who it would help, who it would leave out and who it would screw over if they took advantage of it.

BOLT: Sure, there is the consensus or at the least the very popular proposal from Democrat which is the Family Act and that bill works where employees and employers both make a small payroll contribution that goes into a fund administered by the federal government and it’s dispersed when workers are eligible and they meet it. That A, doesn’t because there’s a dedicated stream through the employer and employee payroll contribution, it doesn’t compete with other federal government priorities for funding but it also again just to circle back it doesn’t force workers to choose between the leave they need now and the retirement security they need down the road. That’s a low bar to hit but the Republican proposal doesn’t cut it.

VALLAS: So another thing that happened last week in congress that we didn’t have a chance to talk about because of the structure of last week’s show but which is very much something I think our listeners are going to care about has to do with payday loans and the fox who is guarding the henhouse these days over at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB.

BOLT: That’s right, you might remember back at the beginning of this congress we were talking about the excitement around the boom, House Financial Services Committee.

VALLAS: You are so excited you got to say that in this episode again.

BOLT: Yes, when I was typing up my notes I was like yes! We’re talking about the Financial Services Committee.

VALLAS: The renamed boom, Financial Services Committee.

BOLT: Yes and we were really excited about the committee assignments because there were so many outstanding freshmen, folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley and this week in particular was Katie Porter, she made full use of her seat on the committee, so there was a hearing where the CFPB director Kathy Kraninger was appearing, remember Kathy Kraninger took over the CFPB from Mick Mulvaney and she has no background in financial services or consumer protection.

VALLAS: And this much became extremely clear to anyone who saw the clip you’re about to talk about.

BOLT: That’s right so if you haven’t seen the video you should check it out. Basically what happens is Katie Porter says, hey I’ll give you an example of a pay day loan, she says you might want to write this down, here at the terms of the loan, here’s the origination fee and can you Kathy Kraninger calculate the APR for me?

VALLAS: So this is the person who is in charge of the entire federal agency that oversees consumer financial protection. That is her job. So if anyone in this country should know about payday loans and how they get calculated and what people end up owing on them, presumably it should be her, that’s where you’re going with this.

BOLT: That’s right and particularly because she is the cop on the beat. She is leading the agency that is supposed to help consumers understand where they might fall prey to predatory practices in the financial services industry and APR which Katie Porter is asking about —

VALLAS: That’s the interest rate.

BOLT: Yes, that is intended to help consumers understand what’s the bottom line, how much is this loan going to cost me to take out? So Katie Porter says here are the terms, can you calculate the APR for me? And Director Kraninger was like this isn’t a math problem, it’s actually just a policy conversation and Katie Porter is actually like it is a math problem and it happens to be a problem that traps people in a cycle of debt, that’s why there’s a whole campaign around this called the Stop the Debt Trap. And that’s true, there’s 80% of payday loans which are typically about two weeks end with the borrower taking out another loan. So holding a copy of the textbook that Katie Porter wrote she walks the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through how to calculate the APR on a payday loan.

VALLAS: And spoiler it’s like 400%.

BOLT: And in this example that Katie Porter was using it’s 520%.

VALLAS: Jesus, and for a comparison for anyone who is hearing that and going I don’t know what that means, we’re talking about blowing out of the water almost any other kind of borrowing that people can do if you think about credit cards for example, you’re talking about a 12 to 30% interest rate over the year.

BOLT: That’s exactly right and so on average these pay day loans have a 400%, I think that is illustrative of just how predatory they are, especially because what it often ends with is the borrower just taking out another loan.

VALLAS: And another loan after that and another loan after that.

BOLT: Exactly. So following this questioning, Katie Porter said hey a lot of people were interested in how to get to the bottom of this math problem and so on her twitter feed she pulled out a white board and said here, let’s everybody calculate this together. And in a way that kind of consumer education piece is the work that the CFPB should be carrying out.

VALLAS: And used to carry out.

BOLT: Indeed, indeed. But it’s now being led by an official that couldn’t give that simple explanation of how it works.

VALLAS: Which maybe explains why she’s totally down for rolling back really critical protections that would help people avoid being stuck in those kinds of debt traps and regulate the amount that payday lenders are allowed to charge but maybe if she doesn’t know the first thing about how they are taking advantage of low income consumers that could explain why she is totally fine sleeping at night knowing that her agency is in charge of actually screwing consumers over instead of protecting them.

BOLT: That’s exactly right.

VALLAS: So one other thing going on in congress is something that we’re going to talk about extensively next week because get excited, we are scheduled for another Disability Justice Initiative takeover.

BOLT: Ayo!

VALLAS: I know I’m excited and I know the Disability Justice Initiative folks are excited to come back in studio. We’re going to be talking about a lot of things, one of those things is actually a piece of legislation that does have a democrat on it, that Democrat is Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York and this is a piece of legislation that purports to address the opioid epidemic. But unfortunately it includes in it and folks may have been seeing on Twitter some pretty significant blowback from the disability community a specific time limit, a number of days, I believe it’s seven days that you’re capped at getting opioids prescribed for you. In an extremely overbroad way that will be massively devastating to countless people across this country who struggle to manage chronic pain. So lots that we’ll talk about next week but just wanted to note that given that that opioid bill is getting a lot of attention right now, hope that Senator Gillibrand’s folks are listening because we would love to talk with you about how we could fix that one particular provision of otherwise important bill.

BOLT: Absolutely.

VALLAS: So Chad we’re actually in recess as we’re having this conversation.

BOLT: We are.

VALLAS: So your folks at Indivisible love recess. You guys do a few things during recess times, what are the Indivisibles out there all talking about during this particular recess.

BOLT: Yeah, so recess is one of the things that Indivisibles do best. Remember recess is the period of time, it’s officially called on the hill the state work period, which is exactly what it sounds like. They’re supposed to be back at home in their state working and the work they’re doing is listening to you. It’s part of the job, they’re supposed to be back at home, having town halls, meeting with their constituents and Indivisibles know how to take full advantage of recess. So we’ve got folks scheduling district office visits with their members of congress, we’ve got folks going to town halls, we’ve got folks scheduling and holding empty chair town halls, which is essentially where Indivisible groups put together a town hall for their member of congress and say don’t even worry about it, we did all the planning for you, we got the venue, we got the microphone, we got the brownies.

VALLAS: It’s not where Clint Eastwood shows up?

BOLT: No, that’s different.

VALLAS: It’s a different empty chair.

BOLT: That’s a different empty chair. So they set everything up and they invite the member and then of course there’s lot of members out there that don’t like to face their cosntituents in this way because there’s a lot maybe they don’t feel so good about what they’re doing in DC.

VALLAS: These are the people who, like Sean Spicer, like to hide in the bushes instead.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: I completely forgot.

VALLAS: I don’t know how you forgot about that one.

BOLT: Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes.

VALLAS: Dude like literally when anyone ever says the name Sean Spicer I just automatically picture a man hiding in the bushes and the way I picture it too it has one of those silly costume pieces that you see in bad movies where someone is dressed like a bush and they have a head piece on that has a bush coming off of their head. That’s what I picture, just to be clear, but sorry you were talking about recess.

BOLT: Indeed, I mean this is, in 2017 when Indivisible was still first getting off the ground that’s actually not far off from what we saw over recess and I’m thinking of Mike Coffman fleeing out the backdoor of a library so that he didn’t have to face his constituents who were at the front door.

VALLAS: Because this was during the health care fight, people were mad.

BOLT: That’s right, that’s right, and so we are back to our roots. Recess is the period of time where members of congress are back on your home turf. So you should be able to find them somewhere in the district and ask them the tough questions. And the opportunity that we have now with Democrats in charge of the House is to go on offense a little bit. For the first two years of the Trump administration they had no agenda setting power, we were in total reactive, defensive mode. But now we can expect more out of the House. We’ve got agenda setting power and so they should be using that opportunity to pass bold progressive legislation.

VALLAS: So what are you hearing your folks asking for in this kind of a recess period.

BOLT: One thing that we know is going to come up for, or at least we expect will come up for a vote next week is the Paycheck Fairness Act.

VALLAS: Yay!

BOLT: Yeah, we’ve talked about this before on this show. This is about equal pay for equal work, and you might say hey, don’t we already have that and the answer we do have the Equal Pay Act but it’s got a number of loopholes, Congress passed the Lily Ledbetter Act in 2009, which extended the statute of limitations to bring cases under the Equal Pay Act but because it’s still got those loopholes we need the Paycheck Fairness Act to close them and really get at the root causes that fuel the gender wage gap. And so we expect it to get a vote next week in the House. And one thing that we’ve noticed in this congress is that Republicans have gotten very good at using a procedural trick called the motion to recommit.

VALLAS: Oh yeah, explain this, the MTR.

BOLT: MTR, so this is, it’s kind of like the last chance for Republicans to amend the bill before it is voted on a final time and passed. So they’re really good at using this trick and essentially what it does is weaken the bill in some way. They’ve already used it for example on the Yemen resolution that went through the House. They tried to use it on HR 1 and it’s always some last minute gotcha trick that is intended to divide the Democratic caucus and cause them political problems down the road.

VALLAS: So the entire point of it is just to force a vote on something that they think will be painful for Democrats and divide the caucus.

BOLT: Yep. That’s exactly right. It’s nothing but a procedural trick that Democrats should just reject. They don’t have to give thoughtful consideration to the policy merits of these political games the Republicans are playing. They can just reject them. in fact, not a single Democratic motion to recommit was successful, 2011 to 2018 and so MTR should get the exact same treatment this time around.

VALLAS: You mean we hold ourselves to different standards Chad, as Democrats? Is that what you’re saying, to you mean that we play by different rules, I find that hard to believe.

BOLT: Well, bully heart Rebecca.

VALLAS: But you were going to explain why you were telling people what MTR is.

BOLT: These are last minute things, it always causes a little bit of chaos on the House floor as folks figure out what to do. They can alleviate the last minuteness of it by just always opposing the MTR as a political trick. And so we don’t know yet exactly what kind of last minute MTR the Republicans are going to offer on paycheck fairness but what we can reasonably expect is that it will weaken the bill in some way. It will make it worse. So Democrats should, they’ve got the votes to pass paycheck fairness, in fact everyone of them is co-sponsoring it. So they just need to say no to the MTR. So that’s one of the most strategic things, it’s going to be coming up right after recess is over that folks can be talking to their member of congress about.

VALLAS: If you’re going to try to envision a whip count that’s pretty solid for passing a bill, every single member of the caucus being a co-sponsor of a bill, I’d say that’s a solid whip count, Chad.

BOLT: You can be fairly confident, that’s the thing. So far what’s happened this congress is that Democrats have indulged the MTR. In fact on the Yemen resolution enough Democrats voted for the MTR that it changed the text of the resolution and of course it had already passed the Senate which just meant that now the House has to pass it again. It messed the whole thing up, passing the Yemen resolution. And so like I said it’s about Republicans playing political games and Democrats, they’re all cosponsoring this bill, they should not indulge any effort to weaken it at this point given that it’s so close to the finish line. So we’ve got paycheck fairness, we’ve got Indivisibles out there talking about Medicare for All, Green New Deal, the Dream and Promise Act, we’ve got Indivisibles whose members of congress are on the appropriations committee we’re at the very beginning of that fight over trying to cut the budget, trying to hold the Trump administration accountable for his spending with Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE and CBP.

VALLAS: And boy is that the other side of the budget conversation, which we’re talking about lots more later on in the show to continue our part one from last week but that’s a very real live set of fights that people are going to need to watch closely and that we’ll be following here.

BOLT: Yep, indeed, and the thing to know about that is we’ll likely have another end of year government funding showdown in December but that will be the end of the fight, the beginning of it is right now.

VALLAS: So I want to take us to the states because there’s a ton going on in the states right now. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, people probably can guess that the third word I’m going to choose is ugly, right, because don’t we always use that phrase but over in the states, one of the things that I feel like we have to start with here and now as we’re taping finally mainstream media including national outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, etc have finally started to cover this story. But one of the biggest stories happening in the past week has of course been the historic and tragic flooding taking place across the Midwest. Estimates are starting to put the damage in terms of lost and dead livestock and lost farm equipment and productivity and damaged land, I mean we’re talking about a trillion dollars from just some of these extremely early estimates. Those numbers are only going to continue to climb and we’re seeing pictures come out of Nebraska and Iowa and South Dakota. I was just looking at some of the pictures from Nebraska before we started rolling tape and it’s not just tragic, it’s images that will stick with you forever if you actually look at them. Baby calves floating by the dozens down through toxic polluted water and farmers are having to go in and pull these dead baby calves out of the water. It’s just really, really horrific stuff. And of course I’m describing the image and some of the dollar figures but the lasting story here gels with one of the coversations we’ve been having on a regular basis on this show which is the effect it’s going to take on the already disastrous farm crisis that this country is facing. One statistic to remind people of, farm filings for bankruptcy just last year across the Midwest rose by 19%, that’s the highest level they’ve been at in a decade according to the American Farm Bureau. And now many of those same farmers have lost their livestock and their livelihoods in the process and yet especially as we’re in a period of talking about this administration’s priorities and its budgets, just a little periodic friendly reminder that the Trump administration has repeatedly called for cutting disaster recovery funds and diverting that money to its deportation force and other types of purposes that are of course intentionally divide and conquer and about throwing red meat to the base. But which are absolutely devastating to the very people that Trump campaigned on promising to help. There’s probably nobody who more represents the forgotten man and forgotten woman or the Trump voter than the faces of these farmers out there in the Midwest who are now losing everything with very little attention being paid on the coasts. So wanted to give a little bit of voice to what’s going on in the Midwest and we’ll come back to that as we continue our series, our periodic series on this show about the farm crisis.

Chad I want to move to good news for a second because that is a particularly bleak story and good news coming out of our own backyard here in DC when it comes to child care.

BOLT: Yes that’s right. So there is a new proposal from the DC council to cap childcare costs at 10% of income.

VALLAS: Woo hoo!

BOLT: So that’s great, great news. We know it is an increasingly large, huge problem. In 2016 in fact one study shows nearly 2 million parents reported having to turn down a job, quit a job or significantly change their job because of child care issues. Child care costs at this point, it costs more than public colleges in many cases so this is a welcome proposal out of the DC council.

VALLAS: Wonderful to see that and particularly enjoying seeing state and local action on this issue when so much of the national debate has been around child care and deservedly so. There is a ton that states and cities can do. So kudos to DC for doing something right here and excited to see other folks follow suit. Now flipping back to bad news for a second, we’ve got some bad news coming out of Florida and that is where that state’s legislature, of course folks remember just a few months ago lots of excitement coming out of Florida when it came to Amendment 4, restored the right to vote to more than a million voters in that state, I believe it’s 1.4 million people who got the right to vote back.

[…]

So much excitement coming out of that state after the ballot measure passed overwhelmingly last November to restore the right to vote in that state to 1.4 million people who had had it taken away from them because of criminal convictions, huge success measure that’s been pointed to as one of the largest if not the largest re-enfranchisement in our nation’s history. And yet now we’ve got the Florida legislature moving forward a proposal that would strip Floridians of the right to vote if they haven’t yet been able to fully pay court fees and fines. The kind of Ferguson style nickel and dime stuff that states across this country and Florida is not exception to engage in to get blood from a stone and extract revenue from Black and brown low-income folks, by and large. This is such an incredibly disappointing piece of legislation to see this legislature moving forward considering that it would be one of the ways to pull the thread and cause the entire blanket to unravel of this tremendous re-enfranchisement success that we saw in November. So definitely one to watch and hopefully one to be able to celebrate its defeat.

BOLT: And it is not unlike what Republican officials in other states have done when states have expanded Medicaid by ballot measure. We’ve seen Republican governors and legislatures try and step in and reverse the Medicaid expansion in a similar way overruling the will of voters, same case here.

VALLAS: And that one happens to be maybe a little more full frontal attack on a success, this might be a side door or a backdoor but it is going to have the exact same effect, given how wide spread these kinds of fines and fees can be. We could be talking about people who are not getting their right to vote back because they owe $500, $1,000, really small amounts of money relatively speaking that a lot of people could argue maybe they never should have owed in the first place considering what the basis for a lot of these fees are. But in ways that could prevent people from participating in society and getting their right to vote back all because we’ve got lawmakers who would like to see that not take effect and have found a creative way to do that. So something to watch and we’ll definitely check back in on that one in the weeks ahead.

We’ve got good news on the flipside also in the criminal justice space coming out of California.

BOLT: Yeah so Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a halt to the death penalty in California.

VALLAS: Woo hoo, yes.

BOLT: This is a big, big victory who anyone who is interested in a more just criminal justice system. For every nine people executed in this country one person is exonerated. I think that probably says all that needs to be said about continuation of the death penalty and why that’s a bad idea. And so kudos to Governor Newsom for taking this step.

VALLAS: Huge deal, just a lot of applause to offer to Governor Newsom for this one and that statistic that you just mentioned, Bryan Stevenson who runs the Equal Justice Institute and it is one of the most vocal opponents of the death penalty in the United States he often makes the point that when you think about stats like that, for every nine people executed one person has been found not guilty and wrongfully convicted and wrongfully exonerated. Think about those numbers. If we were having any other policy conversation and this is a point he often makes, if we were talking about say, aviation safety and for every nine flights that land safely one flight goes down in flames and all the passengers die we wouldn’t have air travel without major changes to that structure and that system. And yet that isn’t the conversation we’re having in this country when it comes to executing our fellow citizens and not being entirely sure whether they actually did it because that’s what that statistic bears out.

BOLT: Yeah. Good for California.

VALLAS: So good for California and boy is that something we need to see nationwide. We had more good news coming out of the states on the criminal justice front as well and so I want to leave this with a good news place, which is one that is extremely close to my heart and that is that this clean slate automated record clearing movement that we’ve continued to watch take state by state by state into the mix following in the footsteps after Pennsylvania became the first state last year to adopt this model.

BOLT: My home state.

VALLAS: See, full circle, we’re back to Harrisburg where it all began and so last year we had Governor Wolf join forces with a Republican controlled legislature as well as advocates from pretty much ever where in the political spectrum and even some NFL players like Malcolm Jenkins. And other people who play for your Eagles.

BOLT: E A G L E S!

VALLAS: You’re welcome that I gave you a chance to do any of that. I could sing fly eagles fly with you, I don’t do the chanting.

BOLT: We’ll put that in the nerdy syllabus.

VALLAS: The chant or the song or what?

BOLT: The song.

VALLAS: The fight song ok, so leaving things there in terms of good news from the states. We would be remiss if we did not close with a factoid of the week Chad, right?

BOLT: It’s my favorite way to close.

VALLAS: It’s your favorite way to do anything is with factoids. Especially when they come from the great Rachel West who is unfortunately, I hate to have to share this news with listeners no longer one of my delightful colleagues at the Center for American Progress because she has sadly left CAP to be wooed successfully over to the hill where she was scooped to go be an economist with the House Education and Labor Committee. Really excited for her, already miss her.

BOLT: Miss you Rachel but congratulations, I’m very excited for you.

VALLAS: And looking forward to working with her in that new role of course but you know what we still have a Rachel West factoid of the week, right because of course we do.

BOLT: The Rachel West factoids persist.

VALLAS: The Rachel West factoids live on and this one in particular week has to do with SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, folks will remember this particular program is not just part of Trump’s proposed cruelty Olympics budget cuts, it is, it is definitely part of that and we have talked about that a little bit more in the next segment of this episode. But folks will remember there’s a specific proposal, we’ve talked about this like a broken record almost every week because it is so important and such a risk. There is a specific proposal that Trump is trying to side step congress to move forward and actually just enact by fiat. It would take as folks will remember food away from upwards of three quarters of a million Americans if it takes effect. Those are people who are unemployed or struggling to find work and so Rachel in her factoid-y ways, did a little bit of number crunching asking the question what would happen if this took effect, not just in terms of how many people would become hungry as a result or would lose food assistance, she asked the question what would happen if this proposal took effect, what would happen to the economy, what would happen to jobs? You know how Republicans always love to say aw man, raising the minimum wage, that’s a job killer. Well we know that that’s mostly a myth but if you actually look at cuts to a program like SNAP that is really a job killer and her analysis found to the tune of 179,000 jobs that would be killed just over the next decade if this rule, just this one single proposed cut to SNAP were to take effect.

BOLT: Yeah compare the economic effects of say, oh I don’t know tax cuts going to the wealthy, where maybe they spend it but maybe they don’t and maybe instead they pass it tax free to their heirs. Versus the government spending in the form of SNAP where the vast majority of SNAP benefits are spent at supermarkets and grocery stores in the first two weeks. That has a direct economic effect and fuels the factoid that Rachel found this week. A 2015 study found that during the great recession expanding SNAP was actually one of the most effective forms of stimulus that the government undertook on a dollar to dollar basis, which just underscores why this is such an important program and Trump’s attempt to go around congress, I mean by the way, when Republicans controlled the House and the Senate they rejected this. They passed a farm bill without this in it. And so this is now Trump’s attempt to go around Congress and just do it on his own, which obviously is a huge problem.

VALLAS: And basically what this finds is it would be a double whammy, it would hurt three quarters of a million, maybe more according to an analysis from Mathmatica which makes us thing it’s maybe a million people or more, that number continues to climb every time smart economists look at it. But not only would it take food away from scores of people it would also hurt the economy, it would also take a significant toll on the economy and including in the form of lost jobs. And that’s a hell of a double whammy when you think about it considering we would be taking jobs away from people and then also when they’re unemployed not having food stamps for them anymore because of how the rule would operate so hell of an insult to injury there.

BOLT: It is a lose, lose, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration coming out and pursuing so heavily a proposal that’s so bad and yet here we are.

VALLAS: HandsoffSNAP.org of course is where you can go to brush up on what’s going on there and before April 2nd which is the date we keep repeating because it is so important that everyone submit public comments, handsoffSNAP.org has a handy comment tool to check out and use and a little shameless plug, share it with your friends, share it with your family.

BOLT: I wouldn’t even call it a shameless plug, I think this is so important, I’ll call that a humble plug.

VALLAS: Oo, a humble plug.

BOLT: A humble plug.

VALLAS: OK and I’m going to challenge our listeners to send handsoffSNAP.org to three friends or family members that have not yet submitted comments because we are mighty and we are many when we all submit comments, just like the old saying goes.

BOLT: Is that how it went.

VALLAS: No there’s no saying, there should be no saying that sounds like that because that was, it was important but it wasn’t particularly well said.

BOLT: Those are always the best kinds of sayings.

VALLAS: We’re just going to keep talking Chad, Will what do you think? Should we just keep talking?

BOLT: Will get us to the end of this.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. And with me to unpack what is in this second round of this year’s cruelty Olympics is Lily Roberts, she’s the director of economic mobility at the Center for American Progress, making her Off Kilter debut, Lily thank you so much for joining us.

LILY ROBERTS: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And Seth Hanlon who is a friend of the show one of our tax gurus, a senior fellow and things at CAP, Seth Hanlon, Seth thanks for coming back.

SETH HANLON: Good to be here.

VALLAS: So guys I feel like I should once in a while come up with really sunny, rosy topics to have you on about. Seth every time I have you on it’s doom and gloom of some kind. So you know apologies, sorry not sorry I guess. But I really appreciate you guys making time because we are now in week two of a grueling two week period during which many of us have all been scrutinizing various pdf documents and tweets and other sources of information about what is in this Trump budget. Before we get into what’s in this second round and what’s new that we’ve learned, would love to remind people a little bit of why we’re in this two week place and how that is not an accident and is very intention on the part of the Trump administration. We talked a little bit last week about this. But it’s no accident that they’re putting out this budget in two parts, a big part of that is to hide the cuts that Trump knows are deeply unpopular and that they’ve been getting hit on every single time they come out with a budget. That is now what has us in a place of being able to react with a lot more information this week than we had last week about what the details tell us about what these cuts are and who’s going to get hurt. All that being said, I feel like there’s been a lot of budget analysis already at this point and so dear listeners we’ve decided to do this a little bit differently than some other segments out there looking at the budget and we’ve decided instead of giving you the everything that’s in it complete look, we’re going to zero in on the top five most egregrious things in this budget and that’s what you guys came ready to do.

So Seth I think you’re kicking us off with number five and it has to do with tax cuts, my God, the thought.

HANLON: Drum roll, please. [LAUGHTER] Of course the budget of course is the statement of the President’s priorities and so it wouldn’t be complete without more tax cuts for the rich and so of course there are about a trillion dollars of additional tax cuts that are skewed to the rich here in this budget.

VALLAS: This is additional tax cuts.

HANLON: This is additional tax cuts so on top of the almost two trillion of tax cuts that were enacted at the end of 2017 so president Trump’s now proposing to make those tax cuts permanent including a number of the tax cuts that benefit him and people like him in particular so the cutting of the estate tax, the special new deduction that we like to call the Trump deduction for owners of business entities like partnerships and LLCs that effectively lowers his tax rates and then also just the lower rates for people at the top. So the new tax cuts cost an additional one trillion dollars.

VALLAS: On top of the two trillion that they’ve already added to the deficit through the 2017 round?

HANLON: Right, exactly, exactly and I think there’s buried in the budget, so first of all they put the tax cuts in their baseline, so they sneak in these tax cuts, they smuggle them in through customs instead of having an actual line in the budget proposal for we would like one trillion dollars of addition tax cuts skewed to wealthy people.

VALLAS: You said they smuggle them in through customs, an interesting metaphor to choose considering this budget and this administration. [LAUGHTER] But I’ll take it.

HANLON: The wall’s not going to be effective, so it’s an additional one trillion dollars and I think that there’s a tacit admission in this budget that the first round of tax cuts aren’t going to have the incredible magical effects that they promised them to have so of course when two years ago they were proposing these tax cuts they said the tax cuts would spark an incredible boom of economic growth, they would permanently raise the growth rate of the United States to about three percent and now two years later the Fed chairman actually just came out today said they’re projecting growth, two years and it’s back to the same trajectory that we’d had before so in other words the tax cuts haven’t, are not creating the kind of low term growth that they promised.

But then of course what they’re saying now is that if you just give us more tax cuts then we can make good on all the promises that we made a couple years ago.

VALLAS: And all of this in the same budget that has all of this rhetoric throughout it about the deficit and oh my God, the deficit, and it’s rising and we have to find places to cut and yet they still find more room for tax cuts for the wealthy.

HANLON: Yep, about a trillion dollars worth.

VALLAS: And Seth I feel like it’s also worth maybe reminding people what we know about the growth rates as you were just describing when you unpack that a little bit make it English because this is actually cuts to the heart of a lot of the trickery in this budget that’s on top of the cruel cuts we’re going to get to in a second.

HANLON: I think the bottom line here and the short story is that the Trump administration is covering up the cost of the tax cuts. At the crux of this budget what it is is they’ve given away two trillion dollars worth of tax cuts and are asking for an additional trillion dollars more and they’re paying for it on the backs of working people and low-income in this country through cuts in health care and nutrition and education and lots of other things that we’ll talk about. But they can’t just come out and say that, right? They can’t just come out and say here’s how we’re paying for our tax cuts. So the fiction that they invented, and this isn’t new to the Trump administration but of course it’s voodoo economics that goes back decades is that the tax cuts are going to magically pay for themselves. And so they promised a couple years ago that the tax cuts would raise the growth rates of the United States from the long term trajectory which most, not just most by basically all mainstream economist, public and private, the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office, the blue chip forecasters think that the economy is going to grow at about 2 percent a year. Of course that’s a projection but that is the best evidence so far. And the Trump administration based on no evidence at all claim that their tax cuts would magically boost growth to about 3 percent a year permanently and therefore pay for themselves.

No serious economists takes this stuff seriously and it’s just the fiction that their tax cut and the strategy behind the tax cut was based on. So now they come back a couple years later and of course we’re looking at the same projected growth rates and growth is slowing in the US this year. But of course they have to pretend that they’re fulfilling those promises.

VALLAS: So they just go in with an eraser, erase two, put in three and they’re like wait now the math works this is great. That’s basically what you’re saying happened?

HANLON: Basically, basically and so they basically none of the overall numbers in this budget, this is not terribly shocking to people two years into the Trump administration but just like you can’t believe anything they say about anything the numbers in this budget typically can’t be trusted. And so they saying they’re restraining, they say that the cuts in the budget to health care and education and other programs are necessary to reduce deficits. But what’s really going on is that they’re paying for the tax cuts.

VALLAS: And while they dole further tax cuts out or at least say that’s what they would want to do if they could.

HANLON: Right of course.

VALLAS: So Lily, I want to go to you next with this next one which is there’s a lot of bait and switching going on, have you noticed this?

ROBERTS: Yeah so we’ve got this, two months ago we had the president giving the state of the Union which is the annual speech where he lays out his priorities and we got some pretty grand goals that some folks would agree with, we had some goals around eradicating pediatric cancer, that was a really big part of the speech.

VALLAS: Big applause line.

ROBERTS: Yeah, exactly, one of the guests the First Lady brought was a child with cancer, I think we’re all for getting rid of pediatric cancer. The announcement was that they were going to allocate $500 million over ten years to solve the problem of pediatric cancer, which if you parcel that out that’s $50 million a year in the context of the NIH budget, which is $39 billion with a ‘B’.

VALLAS: NIH being the National Institutes of Health.

ROBERTS: $50 million a year is very little, it’s a drop in the bucket of $39 billion and then on top of that they proposed to cut that budget, they proposed to cut the NIH in this budget by five billion dollars. So they’ve got this idea they’re going to give a tiny new chunk of money to eradicate pediatric cancer but actually what they’re going to do overall is reduce staffing and take away grant programs to scientists and all kinds of things that are very likely to have impact when it comes to solving pediatric cancer. It’s not just the cancer world, the president talked about eradicating HIV in the State of the Union and again if we go through these health care cuts, Medicaid, Medicare, if you takea way people’s health care they are very likely to not be able to access medication or treatment for HIV. So there’s no way to eradicate HIV that doesn’t including expanding healthcare and instead what they’re saying is we’re going to take health care away.

VALLAS: His budget also, doesn’t it cut the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control by a third, if we’re talking about huge cuts to agencies that are relevant in these spaces?

ROBERTS: Absolutely and there are other science agencies as well, the National Science Foundation, offices where they are making grants to researchers, there’s a ton of both biology, medicine and other kinds of science that are just totally gutted by this budget.

VALLAS: So they wanted the talking point about kids with cancer, which of course makes sense and everyone was happy to clap for but when you actually look at it basically what I’m hearing is it’s one step forward, a million steps back.

ROBERTS: Absolutely and I think it’s easy to talk about science in the context of health care but science research that the federal government supports leads to a ton of economic growth two so it’s just a bad economic decision to take away funding. The federal government did the research that invented the internet and iPhone screens, those are things that are huge engines within the economy. So not only are you really under supporting health care research but you’re taking away research support for these other agencies as well.

VALLAS: While you’re saying that I’m looking at my sad iPhone with all its cracks in the screen and I’m like man, I haven’t been very nice to this research that produced this but point well taken. And if you’re keeping with that bait and switch theme, boy is there so much more going on when you think about things that he has promised as recently as the State of the Union just a few weeks ago even though it feels like we’ve lived a lot of lives since then. And then you actually look at the budget which is where the rubber meets the road infrastructure is hugely in that category, right?

ROBERTS: Yeah, it’s eternally infrastructure week.

VALLAS: By the way happy infrastructure week, I forgot to tell you that when you came into the studio.

ROBERTS: Thank you they should make cards for that now at CVS that you can just pick up.

VALLAS: We should actually and get that for Kevin DeGood, CAP’s infrastructure guru, yeah note to self, pick those up.

ROBERTS: Just hand him a new one every week. Infrastructure, so part of this plays into this two part budget idea where last week we got some of the topline stuff and we got a lot of the narrative that was coming out of the administration and then this week is where we actually found out how they were going to make things happen. So last week we got this highlight about two hundred billion dollars in increases for infrastructure and then this week we read that there’s 286 billion cut just in transportation. So it’s like what is infrastructure? How on earth are you making infrastructure happen if what you’re actually doing is cutting the programs that are these ongoing ways to improve infrastructure around the country.

VALLAS: Seth, you looked like you were going to say something there.

HANLON: This is a fundamental con, this is so characteristic of Donald Trump to, this is Trump University budget, to promise $50 million in pediatric cancer research and then take away $4.5 billion.

VALLAS: It’s a Ponzi scheme.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

HANLON: It’s the types of budget tricks that you would expect from a con man.

VALLAS: Well said, so another category of egregiousness in this budget is just outright eliminations of programs, many of which actually contribute to the survival of humans who otherwise might not survive without some of the assistance provided by some of the programs that this budget zeroes out. One of the documents that you guys and I and other people at CAP and other places have all been nerding out with and referring to has one of the most Orwellian names. So when you look at these budget documents for any of you listeners who have not been doing this and boy do I envy your life in a lot of respects if that is the case. The budget this year is titled a budget for a better America, it has a little tag line, “promises kept, taxpayers first” it’s almost like The Onion came up with the branding here because of how absolutely bullshit so much of this is on its’ face. But this document I’m referring to that has all of some of the scariest stuff in it, it’s called “Major Savings and Reforms”, everyone is sending it around being like have you looked at at the MSAR? Just giving folks a little glimpse into the nerd life for people who spend time with these budget docs. But when you look at these major savings and reforms document it’s basically a hit list of all the critical programs that this administration wants to either deeply slash or outright eliminate, what are some of these programs that they just totally want to zero out?

ROBERTS: There are a bunch, you talked about supporting the basic living standards and we have a bunch, Meals on Wheels, programs that support low-income and elderly people who need help with utilities or heat in their house, these programs that really support a basic function for folks, those are always on the chopping block with this kind of administration.

VALLAS: Some of those have pretty wonky names, I feel like that’s why they don’t get a ton of love, so people might know Meals on Wheels, they might not know that say the Social Services Block Grant or the Community Development Block Grant or the sources of federal funds that support these kinds of programs but that’s what you’re referring to there.

ROBERTS: Yeah and often there are national programs that disperse funds to community organizations or non-profits, sometimes they support food banks or community centers, that kind of thing. So a lot of organizations, non-profits in towns across America, when they hear about the Community Development Block Grant getting cut, that’s a huge source of funding for them. it would prevent a ton of really great services that happen across the country.

VALLAS: I interrupted you, you were naming programs being eliminated and there’s a lot more.

ROBERTS: I know, so depressing, such a depressing list, there are all of those programs, there are also a ton of education, I think it was like 29 education programs that add up to $6.7 billion in education overall. And that’s everything from teacher training to after school programs and then my personal wonky interest in this is that there are these things can the Regional Education Labs which are these centers that figure out best practices in education. So we’re doing all these things where we require different education or health care to be more evidence focused which is awesome, across the aisle people are always saying oh we should be doing evidence based policy making and that kind of thing but then this budget cuts the agencies that help different organizations become evidence based so the Regional Education Labs do all this research about what are the best practices in teaching, how should you organize curricula, they disseminate relationships across the country or to school districts but that’s what gets cut in the budget like this. Organizations that are trying to help, federal agencies that work across districts or across states or across practices.

VALLAS: And before we actually started taping you were relating some wonky memories of how this has played out in past budget rounds and maybe what Trump has learned or hasn’t learned from some of that and some of that actually has to do with these education programs.

ROBERTS: Yeah it’s pretty ridiculously wonky so thanks listeners for bearing with me.

VALLAS: Here for it.

ROBERTS: But I feel like of any audience this is it, so last year there was the Trump budget proposed combining three different programs, it was the Regional Education Labs that I was talking about as well as a data system and the comprehensive centers, they basically help implement K-12 policy. And so the budget proposed combining these and there was this huge outcry in the education community because it makes no sense to combine these different programs. They have different goals, they’re funded in different ways, they’re under different parts of the Department of Education. It was just really silly and so there was this outcry, people pushed back so this year the solution that the Trump administration came up with was just cutting all three programs. Rather than combine them let’s just get rid of them. So it’s frustrating to be like I guess you learned that people were going to push back against that policy choice of combining them but you learned in the wrong direction.

VALLAS: Which is such a through line I think across the board. Right down to the fact that they even decided to release this budget in two parts, which itself is a learning proof. They learned that getting slammed on the budget shows that people don’t like their policies but instead of changing the policies they just changed the rollout structure, that’s literally what they learned from last year. There’s more programs that they eliminated. Seth what else got eliminated?

HANLON: Another one is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program or LIHEAP. So this is a program that provide financial support for people to afford, for low-income people to afford home energy assistance, heating in the winter and cooling in the summer and about 6 or 7 million families across the country rely on this program and it’s entirely eliminated in the Trump budget under the guise of needing to reduce deficits.

VALLAS: This was one of those programs back when I was still representing clients as a legal aid lawyer where of all the programs that don’t have national name recognition that play such a critical role in people’s lives, LIHEAP is top of that list. We’re talking about seniors who otherwise can’t afford to heat their home in the winter or can’t afford air conditioning, literally people die every single year by numbers that would shock our listeners when they don’t have the funds that it takes to heat and cool their homes in healthy ways and how do people die? That’s not me being histrionic. This is not just a function of people getting sick because of hypothermia or illness or even heat stroke, that is part of what goes on. People also die in house fires because they use their oven to heat the home because their kids are cold sleeping, there’s horrible things that result when people don’t have the money it takes to keep their home healthy and safe. And that’s the program that you’re talking about here that is just yet again just put up for complete zeroing out.

HANLON: And a negligible amount of dollars in terms of the budget.

VALLAS: Again, a drop in the bucket. So also speaking about housing a lot of housing programs actually get eliminated in this budget, one of which is one that provides significant assistance to homeless folks, it’s called the HOME program, there’s rental assistance getting deep cuts and some programs eliminated outright as well. Just a tremendous amount here. Also more on the education side of things, right Seth, some teacher training?

HANLON: Yeah I think Lily had mentioned the main programs for teacher training and also after school programs and then the Department of Education, and also student loan programs, so both the public service loan forgiveness program and also subsidized students loans are eliminated and part of more than $200 billion that they take away from funds to make college affordable.

VALLAS: And just eliminating the public service loan forgiveness program, if you could just think about how many mean spirited proposals are in here. And that’s probably of interest to a lot of listeners, many of whom are folks who actually do work in this space and maybe themselves have been recipients of public interest loan forgiveness and that allows people to actually enter fields where they’re not making bank because they’re actually doing good work where you’re not going to be there for the money, that’s the kind of choices this budget makes through and through. And at the same time Seth we were just talking about the very different choices when you think about eliminating LIHEAP for example that get made when it comes to defense spending.

HANLON: So I think one of the things that hasn’t gotten all that much focus is just basically Trump is proposing a huge run up in defense spending and doing it essentially by creating a huge slush fund for himself, for the administration that I think has gotten some pushback in Congress but it’s one of the most irresponsible things in the budget. So his budget proposes cutting domestic programs by about 10 percent this year. They say 5 percent but it’s actually much closer to 10 percent, which from year to year is a crushing cut overall and of course as we mentioned a lot of programs get cut by 100 percent. But 10 percent for all domestic programs from one year to another is a pretty big shock and it would have bad economic effects to take that funding out of the economy this year and it would have effects on a whole range of different areas.

But defense is just treated totally differently and so we see an increase in defense spending from about $715 billion this year to $750 this year, which would, and when Trump came in defense spending was about $600 billion, it was still enormous. And now he’s increasing it all the way up to $750 billion at the same time he’s cutting domestic programs and doing an end run around the budget caps that are restraining domestic programs and that he doesn’t provide an ounce of relief to in his budget. And the way he does that end run is by, he’s asking for $175 billion into what’s called the OCO, or Overseas Contingency Operations Fund.

VALLAS: And this is wonky and it involves acronyms but it’s useful to understand because this is a lot of where the trickery happens.

HANLON: And so it’s basically the account in the pentagon that they use for fighting wars abroad. So President Trump came in promising to end the wars and bring our troops home and also to make our allies pay, he’s also going around the world saying that our allies need to pay for defense, we’re getting robbed, he’s going to save us taxpayers money and at the same time proposing enormous defense increases paid by tax payers so defense will have increased nearly 20% under President Trump under this budget. So total double standard when it comes to Pentagon funding versus other vital national priorities.

VALLAS: And also just really not getting talked about at all as you said, so I was supposed to be doing a countdown while we were doing this guys, I’ve been missing my opportunities to be like number five, number four, alright we’ll go big with the last two. So number, which is out of the blue because no one knew which ones were five, four and three, but guys you’ve heard them all already and they were bad but it gets worse. So number two I’m going to get up on my soapbox for this one, buried in this budget we talked a little bit last week about how yet again Trump breaks his promise of not cutting Social Security by calling for deep, deep, deep Social Security cuts in this budget, it’s $84 billion he calls for over a decade again he targets the Social Security Disability programs because he piles cruelty on top of cruelty with this cut like many others as we’ve been discussing but buried in that Social Security budget, what he is calling for is something that’s gotten almost no attention yet and should scare everyone because of where this goes and that is a major administration effort to spy on Social Security Disability beneficiaries. Of course he likes to frame this as though it’s about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, all one word of course, wastefraudabuse, wastefraudabuse, gotta say it like that. But it’s about being able to spy on disability beneficiaries social media accounts, their Facebook, their Twitter, their Instagram, I’m running out of social media accounts to list because I actually hate social media, secret to know about me except for Twitter.

And he would do this under the auspices of rooting out people who aren’t really disabled, I’m putting that in all kinds of scare quotes because apparently having a vibrant social network and leveraging social media to do that somehow is evidence that you’re not disabled. Absolutely horrifying of course where this goes, major blow back on social media including on lots of people with disabilities using of course ironically that very medium to raise their voices and say why this is such a terrible and terrifying proposal but wanted to give a little bit of voice to that one as well as a shoutout to Senator Brown and Senator Casey who over in the Senate sent a very sharply worded letter to President Trump expressing some significant concerns with that particular proposal because of how discriminatory and how tone-deaf and how illadvised it is and also the potential it has for creep into so many other areas. So I’ll dismount from my soapbox but another egregious thing buried in this budget to know about. And then number one I guess guys and I don’t know that we did this in order of what was the most egregious necessarily but we’re going to close it out by talking a little bit about why all these things we’ve been describing which might sound theoretical because everyone likes to say president’s budgets are dead on arrival are actually things that should totally be scaring you and why this budget is not DOA. Seth what do you say when people say this budget is DOA?

HANLON: I think this year in particular it’s not DOA. We always say that every year because the president’s budget matters, it’s his priorities, it’s the direction that he’s pushing the nation and it’s what he would do if given the opportunity, which you never know when he will get that opportunity or take things hostage like by shutting down the federal government so we have to take the president’s budget seriously. But I think this year we have to take it especially seriously because there’s been no overall budget deal in congress. So unlike last year when there was, congress had already reached an agreement about the overall funding levels and already reached an agreement for how much is going to go to defense and how much is going to go to domestic priorities and then they had to haggle out the details and that of course wasn’t easy but there was at least an overall agreement, there’s no overall agreement this year. And so without an agreement there will be those kind of cuts to domestic programs of nearly 10 percent that we talked about. And so this is a very real issue. People and communities are going to have to mobilize and really pay attention and make their voices heard in congress this year between now and over the summer and the next fiscal year begins in October.

VALLAS: And Lily there are other reasons as well why this budget isn’t DOA part of that has to do with the fact that there are proposals in here that Trump is actually trying to carry out himself, not even looking to wait for legislation.

ROBERTS: Yeah there are several agencies that there would be if he can get cuts to SNAP for example not through the legislative process he’s would take that opportunity. There are several options like that and then there’s also last week there was this narrative section and there were a lot of discussions around changing things to block grants and introducing requirements that people have to hold a job or demonstrate that they’re looking for a job to access services and that signals to states that that’s a politically popular thing to do with the Trump supporters. That’s what they should be working on and so there’s a lot of opportunity I think from states to say well absolutely we should be focusing on your favorite, waste, fraud, and abuse because that’s the signal we’re getting on the White House level.

VALLAS: And you’re so right to mention SNAP of course I’m a broken record on this but I will be on April 2nd on this when the comment period closes we talked a little bit earlier in the show on this but this is the dot that Lily is connecting. Of course included in Trump’s proposed SNAP cuts in this budget that would slash SNAP literally by a third, that’s what he wants to do is just cut the program by a third, buried in there is of course the proposal he is trying to carry out by fiat which would take food assistance away from upwards of three quarters of a million people or if you talk to Mathamatica maybe more like a million based on some analysis that came out last week who are people trying to find steady work and having a hard time doing that. Those are people who need food, not food taken away from them and something he doesn’t want to wait for congress to do because he already did that and they didn’t they sent it back to him and said no thanks and so he said cool I’ll take this matter into my own tiny hands. And of course the wall, very much still a live fight, Seth where the hell is that going?

HANLON: He asked for funding again from Congress for the wall another $8.5 billion in this budget. He doesn’t believe that he actually has to pass a law to build his wall and so is doing an end run around Congress declaring a national emergency and I think that’s headed for the courts and we’ll see. But obviously congress has the power of the purse and as our colleague Sam Berger has written extensively there’s a specific emergency authority to do military construction and it’s very clear that whether or not you think there’s an emergency which of course there’s not an emergency. But even if there were an emergency he doesn’t have the power to just use the military like that to build a wall going around congress.

VALLAS: And I just enjoy so much everytime someone points out there isn’t an emergency but even if there were because of how scared Republicans get when they realize where that goes because we are facing certain emergencies like climate change that they would not like declared emergencies.

HANLON: Yep, yep and congress yet again passed a resolution of disapproval of the emergency and didn’t get the two-thirds but they did get clear majorities in both houses. So Congress has rejected the wall over and over again and he’s attempting an end run and I think the citizens’ whose land is going to be taken, the states were effected and congress is just going to have to go to the courts to stop it.

VALLAS: And then of course there’s Medicaid and that’s another huge part of the cuts we talked about last week in this budget we got more detail on that this week but in there as well another policy that is playing out in the states as we speak which is taking healthcare away from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job for all the reasons Lily was describing before and that’s something that very much is a live fight in the states with upwards of 18,000 people in Arkansas already having lost their Medicaid because they can’t find a job or get enough hours at their job all thanks to Trump’s policy that he decided not to wait for congress to be able to put in legislation when he didn’t get his way as a part of the Affordable Care Act repeal fight that he was frankly not very happy with the end of because all of us were because people got to keep their health care. So Lily, Seth thank you guys so much for coming by and also bearing with me as I wasn’t doing the count down I feel like one of you could have said something.

ROBERTS: It became a surprise, I like that, it was like oh we skipped four and three but we’re back at two.

VALLAS: A bait and switch of my own I suppose.

ROBERTS: You’re doing the funny math, this is the funny math and the two part rollout

VALLAS: I guess that’s what happened.

HANLON: It’s contagious.

VALLAS: I guess I shouldn’t throw stones from this very glassy house. Seth Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on tax and budget and many other things. Lily Roberts is the director of economic mobility and stuff at CAP. Looking forward to having you back already and Seth have you back soon I’m sure and thanks to you both for all the wonkery.

HANLON: Always fun, thanks Rebecca.

ROBERTS: Thanks.

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 each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.