Episode 13: #TrumpCuts

President Trump’s budget is a body-slam to everyone but his millionaire and billionaire friends. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

President Trump released his budget this week, and as expected, it’s a body-slam to everybody but the wealthy. Harry Stein joins Rebecca and Jeremy to walk through some of the budget’s most egregious cuts. Next, Anna Chu and Bishop Dwayne Royster break down how the budget hits women and communities of color — and what advocates can do to stop these cuts. And finally, Alex Lawson joins to debunk the myth that President Trump’s budget didn’t break his promise not to cut Social Security.

This week’s guests:

• Harry Stein, Center for American Progress
• Bishop Dwayne Royster, PICO National Network
• Anna Chu, National Women’s Law Center
• Alex Lawson, Social Security Works

For more on this week’s topics…

• The full rundown of how the budget hurts people with disabilities and economic security in general.
• Dylan Matthews with the nitty-gritty on President Trump’s broken Social Security promise.
• Greg Kaufmann on how this budget is straight up class warfare.

This program was released on May 26, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Trump’s budget is out and it is a body slam to everyone in this country who is not a millionaire or a billionaire or a corporation. Because don’t forget, corporations are people too. So with me to unpack what’s in the budget, who are the winners, who the losers is Harry Stein, the budget guru and beloved friend of Off-Kilter. Harry, thank you so much for joining the show.

HARRY STEIN: It’s good to be here. I haven’t been body slammed yet today, it’s been a good day.

VALLAS: The day is young. And Jeremy you’re here. Jeremy you didn’t let me do my line.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Oh, I stole the joke?

VALLAS: No, I was about to say it. And Jeremy’s here too.

SLEVIN: Oh yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: You forgot your intro!

SLEVIN: I forgot. Well, you forgot –

VALLAS: No, you just tried to interrupt me like you usually do.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: Touché. Touché.

VALLAS: No, but please make your joke.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: Way to take all of the air out of a joke! You got me.

[LAUGHTER]

STEIN: Three policy analysts war into a bar.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: OK, let’s set aside some time for the joke.

VALLAS: Thank you. That’s what I wanted.

SLEVIN: The joke’s over.

VALLAS: I think the joke is obvious. The point is, I’m not going to ask you about the CBO score because I’m really afraid of what would happen to my personal safety if I were to do that. [LAUGHTER] No, but seriously, I actually think it’s fair to call this budget a body slam to everyone who’s not wealthy. Harry, let’s do it this way. There’s a lot in the budget, we could spend a lot of time walking through the nitty gritty and you know what? There are plenty of radio shows and podcasts that are going to do that this week, so let’s do something different. What shocked you the most about what was in this budget? What was most horrifying?

STEIN: So, there’s things in here that we kind of knew were coming. Huge cuts to Medicaid, but President Trump promised he wasn’t going to cut Medicaid. I wish that this was surprising but we already knew that he was going to break that promise.

SLEVIN: Because he already broke that promise.

STEIN: Because he already broke that promise. You know, huge cuts to nutrition assistance, but we kind of saw that coming. Although it seemed to be a surprise to his Secretary of Agriculture who doesn’t even support the cuts and says food stamps are great as they are.

VALLAS: And just last week, we should use Secretary Perdue’s quote and actually bring his words back out, he said testifying in front of congress, “Why would you fix something that isn’t broken?” And you know what, I couldn’t have put it better myself.

SLEVIN: That’s a great question.

STEIN: It’s a good man over there apparently. [LAUGHTER] But the thing that, the one that I didn’t see coming, they go after the Special Olympics. Now I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know that was a thing you could do in the budget. But they found some money for the Special Olympics and they took it away from the Special Olympics because apparently those fat cats at the Special Olympics are riding too high on the taxpayer dime. I didn’t even know this was a thing. That’s happened to me a lot this week where there’s been these weird fights that are, I didn’t even know that this was a fight. But apparently funding the Special Olympics is controversial.

VALLAS: Well it never has been and Harry I have to say, I admire your honesty. You’re like the budget guy and at this point in the week you’re like you know? All week I’ve been finding out that things are things and I didn’t know things were things! And you know, that’s exactly right and I think a lot of us have been having that reaction. But on the Special Olympics, I think part of what makes it so shocking that they are defunding, literally removing all federal funding from the Special Olympics. Not only is this not a controversial program, it is maybe the most bipartisan beloved thing in this country, right? Or one of them. It’s I mean, up there with school lunch, although possibly there are cuts to school lunch in this budget, we’re not entirely sure because it’s very vague. But so no, there’s no fight there. It’s like –

SLEVIN: Or Children’s health insurance, I mean they’re cutting CHIP, like –

STEIN: You know, in the skinny budget, if we were having this conversation a couple of months ago when they put out their skinny budget, which we did, great talk. [LAUGHTER] The one that seems so bizarre to cut was Meals on Wheels. And I wonder if they looked at themselves and they were like, guys, hold my beer.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: What can we do to top this?

STEIN: And they found it!

VALLAS: Well I mean, if Paul Ryan was dreaming back in his keg party days about how he was going to annihilate Medicaid. Not that I stopped saying decimate because I was recently taught, decimate actually means cut by one-tenth. And this budget cuts Medicaid in half, right, the ‘deci’ part. Back to our latin that we may or may not have learned. So no more decimate, I’m saying annihilate. But Paul Ryan was dreaming when he was doing keg stands of annihilating Medicaid, apparently so we’re told. And he told reporters about this. Maybe that’s actually what happened here.

STEIN: Can you imagine being at a keg party and some guy is like, man I’d just love to eliminate Medicaid. Someone’s like, no, Meals on Wheels. And then Paul Ryan walks in and he says no Special Olympics. What kind of a conversation do these people have?

SLEVIN: I’m going through, I feel like it’s the nature of budgets that I mean, maybe not for you, you just like, download all the information. But the kind of, there is so much in there that it kind of leaks out. I’m cheating and looking at your list. Eliminates funding for the Limb Loss Resource Center, the Paralysis Resource Center and the Special Olympics. Like, I just learned just now that it eliminated funding for people that have lost limbs.

STEIN: So this is a budget, we all remember President Trump during the campaign, mocking people with disabilities. And this is a budget that does seem to have it in for people with disabilities in particular. You know, another thing that was, I didn’t know that this was a thing before this week. There’s been this very hard argument that people have been having that apparently has two sides. Is Social Security Disability Insurance Social Security? How is this a thing? The first two words of the program are Social Security. You pay for it with your payroll taxes like you pay for the rest of Social Security.

SLEVIN: You’re forgetting about ‘core’ Social Security. I believe if you go back to Donald Trump’s tape you’ll hear Mick Mulvaney, before every speech going ‘core’. [LAUGHTER] We should just insert Mick Mulvaney saying ‘core’ Social Security before Donald Trump over and over again, promised not to cut all of Social Security. By the way, there is no such thing as ‘core’ Social Security. Mick Mulvaney made it up.

VALLAS: I don’t want to steal Alex Lawson’s thunder because we have him on later in the episode to talk about this very thing so stay tuned Social Security lovers, I know you’re out there and you’re listening. But that is not the only promise that Trump breaks in this, and Jeremy, it’s hard to go from limb loss to where I’m headed but I think, continuing the parade of horribles. Maybe this is a little bit less shocking to people, maybe it’s not, but the amount of funding that it takes out of life saving medical research, right? So whether it’s cancer or other things, it absolutely not decimates but annihilates the NIH, the National Institutes of Health and literally takes one billion dollars out of cancer research. I guess, I just wonder, and I feel like from here maybe we need to go into the conversation about their math errors or their intentional math errors but are these people who actually sat down and actually thought about what they were doing? Or did they just decide they were going to put it all in and try and come up with the biggest number they could and they ran out of stuff?

STEIN: So I think there’s a mix of two things in this White House. There’s people like Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director who really does believe that we shouldn’t be funding Special Olympics or Meals on Wheels or the National Institutes of Health or any of those things.

VALLAS: He said there is no evidence those programs work.

STEIN: Right, he’s just not looking for it. And so there’s some true believers, and Mick Mulvaney’s actually been quite transparent about this, that he’s been trying to convince Trump to make even more cuts. And then I think that frankly President Trump, I don’t know that he really cares about what the consequences are. He’s not even in the country when the budget is released.

SLEVIN: I don’t think he even knows what’s in his budget.

STEIN: I don’t think that he knows what’s in the healthcare bill, I don’t think he knows what’s in the budget.

SLEVIN: Or cares!

STEIN: I mean, I think that, you know if you introduced, and I think it was Seth Meyers that made this point. If you introduced President Trump to candidate Trump, man those two wouldn’t get along. And candidate Trump said I’m not going to cut Social Security, I’m not going to cut Medicaid, I mean I he would hate President Trump.

VALLAS: He also said, sorry Jeremy I just pulled –

SLEVIN: Pulled a me?

VALLAS: — One of your tricks and interrupted you so I’m just going to move forward and lean into it. [LAUGHTER] So, feels good to be you! Now I’m the one talking!

SLEVIN: Lean in.

VALLAS: But candidate Trump also promised to save and bring back jobs. And this is a budget, we should talk not just about what’s in it but what’s not in it, it is a budget that does absolutely freaking zilch to create jobs or to raise wages which is what the people who placed their bets on him in November, outside of the donor class, actually were asking for.

SLEVIN: And massive cuts things like the Highway Trust Fund that provide thousands of jobs. And you broke down, in every congressional district, how many jobs this budget literally cuts through this defunding.

VALLAS: While also cutting job training to boot.

STEIN: Right, this is a budget, we should be investing in job training, we should be investing in infrastructure. Again, candidate Trump wanted to invest in infrastructure. President Trump makes an empty promise on this. It’s really just a sop to wealthy investors it’s not going to do anything for infrastructure. And he cuts funding for roads and bridges in the Highway Trust Fund, and we translated this into job losses. By 2027 the cuts get bigger each year, it’s 250,000 lost jobs across the country. We break it down for each state. And you know, there’s just there is. We should be investing in these things, instead he’s cutting them. We should be investing in communities left behind. Instead, he’s getting rid of the Appalachian Regional Commission. He even cuts funding in this budget, you know going back to things that I was shocked to see in there. He goes after funding specifically for inspecting coalmines for safety violations. Coalmine safety.

VALLAS: Doesn’t get more Trump voter than that.

STEIN: Right. And you know, it’s just absolutely a budget that leaves behind people who were hoping for a government that would be looking out for them and looking out for communities that were left behind. It’s a budget that rigs the system even more. We haven’t talked about the tax cuts too much. And they’re kind of disguised in there.

VALLAS: Well, that’s where we have to go next.

STEIN: Huge tax cuts for people at the top.

SLEVIN: I keep hearing their talking point on this, and this is Mulvaney’s talking point. I just watched Paul Ryan on Fox News saying the same thing. He’s like, finally this is a budget that focuses on the people who are paying the money, not the people who are getting the services.

VALLAS: As if those are different people.

SLEVIN: Is if those are, A, different people and as if you’re actually helping the vast majority of the people who A, getting the services and are paying the services. No, you’re helping a tiny, tiny fraction of the top 1 percent of people who are paying that money.

VALLAS: Let’s give an example and break this down. Because I feel like often the way this stuff gets talked about it’s oh my God and tax cuts for the wealthy and you know what? We say that a lot too, I know I’m guilty of that. Let’s make this concrete. Harry, the estate tax; we talked on this show a while back about the estate tax and if I’m remembering correctly it hits the richest 0.2 percent of households. Health holds also. In this country, and that’s who gets affected. Of course Republicans like to call it the death tax, and oh my God it’s so oppressive. But for the cost of repealing the estate tax that hits those 0.2 percent richest of households in this country, which Trump proposes to do in this budget, you could feel more than 6 million hungry seniors through Meals on Wheels for a year. So I guess I’m sick and tired of hearing the administration and also Republicans in Congress who are defending this budget, saying that this has anything to do with deficit reduction because no, it’s picking and choosing winners and losers.

STEIN: That’s right and, you know, the reason that the estate tax only impacts the wealthiest 0.2 percent of estate is the first 5.4 million dollars in your estate is exempt from estate taxes. It’s only after that amount that you start to pay.

SLEVIN: [INAUDIBLE] 5.3

VALLAS: You’re not getting a pay raise this week, Jeremy.

[LAUGHTER]

STEIN: And there’s even better news, I suppose. If you’re married you double that because it’s for married couples, it’s twice that level. And it’s only, remember, that you pay taxes just on the next dollar after that. So if you have an estate that’s worth 5, one dollar about that. You just pay taxes on that one dollar.

SLEVIN: So if you are a married couple and you worth 10 million dollars –

STEIN: You will pay zero federal estate taxes.

SLEVIN: Wow.

VALLAS: Under current law.

SLEVIN: Wow. So it’s only people, it’s only multi millionaires –

VALLAS: Gajillion-aires.

SLEVIN: Otherwise know as Gajillion-aires.

VALLAS: Thank you, thank you for that.

SLEVIN: Or Chamillionaires.

VALLAS: Thank you for validating my lexicon.

SLEVIN: Or deci-millionaires.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Oh the throwback, relating back the comedic device that Jeremy has.

STEIN: But there is a point in here that I think is important. Mick Mulvaney and Paul Ryan will say, you know, it’d be nice if we could have Social Security and Medicare but we’re broke folks. America is broke, we can’t afford it anymore. And it’s such a lie. And here’s how you know it’s a lie. We could either repeal the estate tax or we could have Meals on Wheels for 6 million seniors instead. I mean, that’s the choice here.

VALLAS: Which he cuts.

STEIN: Which he cuts. So instead of that, instead of having more Meals on Wheels he repeals the estate tax instead and cuts Meals on Wheels.

SLEVIN: It’s ironic because it’s almost like Trump has leaned into that. Like, he’s not using the old ‘we’re broke’ talking point as much. He’s almost saying, we’re going to spend a lot of money on the military and we’re not going to spend it on poor people or middle class people.

VALLAS: We’re going to build a wall.

SLEVIN: Like he’s almost being honest about what they’re doing and I think, like, it’s going to be clarifying for voters. But it’s, I forgot about that talking point. Oh, well we can’t spend money on this, we’re broke. Trump’s like, no we’re just going to spend money on things that hurt you and not the things that you actually need.

VALLAS: So point-austerity, now we’re into honesty it’s seems. I mean there was a rare moment of honesty that Mick Mulvaney actually had during one of his press conferences. He was asked point blank; do you hope that people who receive Social Security Disability Insurance receive less in benefits or fewer people get those benefits.

SLEVIN: Or do you think this budget could do that?

VALLAS: And he goes, “I hope so.” That was his answer, and he moved on! He moved on, so hey, the man was honest you’ve got to give him that. But Harry, I want to make sure that we get this in. So, a lot of folks have said, you know what, we can get all bent out of shape about this budget and we can all do the radio shows and we can all talk about it, but you know what, it’s dead on arrival. What does it really matter? I have to say, personally, that talking point pisses me the eff off — because I’ve been told I need to stop cursing on this show, I have some listeners who don’t like it so you know who you are. But it pisses me the eff off because it is so not true! Harry, why is it not true?

STEIN: So, it’s remarkable how similar the Trump budget is to the Ryan budget. And that actually shouldn’t be surprising. President Trump’s budget director is Mick Mulvaney, he was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, so their budgets were even crazier than the Ryan budget. These are both budgets that make huge cuts to Medicaid, huge cuts to nutrition assistance, and give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest people. Both the Trump budget, you know, everyone’s been correctly pointing out how ridiculous the numbers are in the Trump budget. They claim it’s balanced, it’s not, the numbers are phony. But, so was the Ryan budget. These are actually very similar structures. So here’s the thing, so keep in mind the cuts in Medicaid here are so big in the Trump budget, they’d cut Medicaid in half by 2027. This is when Medicaid is supposed to cover 87 million people.

SLEVIN: That’s 14 million people who would lose medicaid just in health care bill alone. Another several million, we don’t even know, on top of that with the budget.

STEIN: Right. So it’s worse than the house health care bill and if we remember that the new CBO score just came out, we know that takes away insurance from 23 million people total, including 14 for Medicaid. But here’s the thing; when people say it’s never going to happen, that sounds crazy to cut Medicaid like that. The house voted for over 800 billion dollars in Medicaid cuts. This is a congress that is fully capable of passing the cuts that are contemplated in the Trump budget. It’s not dead on arrival, don’t let off the hook. Ask them, well will you support or will you oppose this cut to Medicaid, this cut to food stamps, these tax cuts for the wealthy? Don’t let them off the hook to just say well, it’s dead on arrival. It’s not until they say it is.

VALLAS: I will confess my nightmare to you, Harry. Actually, well, I’ve got two recurring nightmares. One of them involves Paul Ryan in pajamas, I’m going to save that one of another day. The other nightmare that is totally the one I’m going to share on air because it’s safe to share on air and it’s not going to mortify me any further than I’ve already done to myself in the last thirty seconds is that House comes out with it’s budget, sometime in June, if impeachment articles have not yet been filed; stay tuned, we’ll see. And they say, you know what, this budget which does some of the same stuff, most of the same stuff as the Trump budget but maybe like slightly dialed back just a couple of numbers, is a very modest and reasonable and compromise budget that everyone should be able to get behind. Look, it’s not as bad as the Trump budget, and then people believe them and somehow Trump has succeeded in pushing the debate so far to the right as the starting point that that actually gets sold as reasonable.

STEIN: That’s absolutely right and you know, even current law is unacceptable here. And certainly, yeah, a Republican budget that’s just a little bit worse than the Trump budget is still absolutely horrible. Current law is the sequester funding levels for next year. Those were remember, designed to so horrible they’d force Congress to do something about it. Congress didn’t do what they were supposed to do. But they’ve struck these short term budget deals. That’s what we need. That’s what we really need is another short term, or maybe long term if we could, but another bipartisan budget deal that actually raises the spending caps. And if Trump’s budget pulls things so much to the right that we lose sight of that, we’re really in trouble. So we need to keep pushing for good funding levels and not just accept the unacceptable status quo.

VALLAS: And that doesn’t even get us to the place that we should be, which is talking about not just even increasing funding for programs through the appropriations process, for example, but say expanding Social Security, making sure that people have health insurance, creating jobs, raising wages —

SLEVIN: Yeah, like a new jobs program, actually thinking aggressively about how we solve the jobs crisis.

VALLAS: And with that, Harry Stein, our budget guru at the Center for American Progress and Jeremy Slevin, the Slevs, who was also here and got interrupted. Thank you both for joining the show, always a pleasure.

STEIN: Thank you.

SLEVIN: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. For more on what the budget means, particularly for women and families and communities of color, and how we fight back, I’m joined by Anna Chu, Vice President of Income Security for the National Women’s Law Center and Bishop Dwayne Royster, the political director of the PICO National Network. NWLC and PICO are two of the nearly twenty organizations from across the progressive community that have come together with the Center for American Progress as part of a national campaign called Hands Off. The campaign has the united goal of rejecting any budget that puts the wealthy few over everyday Americans.

So Bishop Dwayne, I want to start with you. There’s been a lot of talk within the beltway, right, about what kind of D.C. people think about this budget. And a lot of those talking points, are maybe what people have been hearing and that’s a lot of what the media has been printing. But you guy at PICO and at PICO Action have a huge field presence and that’s really what you guys are about. So I would love to hear what you guys are hearing from the field; what are people taking away from this Trump budget? What are activists thinking?

BISHOP DWAYNE ROYSTER: Sure, so Rebecca thanks for having us on the show. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Actually, yesterday when I came in the spend time with folk on the hill when we launched Hands Off. One of the things, I actually left a meeting of 80 of our clergy and lay leaders that was taking place in Baltimore. When I got back later that afternoon, I had to report out in terms of what was going on. And they had been getting text and tweets all day about the budget that had come out. And the impact that it was going to have in this community. You know, the PICO National Network is the largest faith based organizing movement in the country. We have 45 federations and 22 states, 1,500 congregations, 40 denominations and faith traditions. About a million and a half families across the country that are working deeply on race and economic work on the ground. We have boots on the ground. People that are actually doing this work.

Folk were, you know what, I got the sense all over again, it was like the day after the election. When many of our undocumented leaders were sort of like, what are we going to do? That when I walked into the room and shared with people what we were talking about and sharing, they were asking the question, OK, we’ve got to get moving. Our families are going to be devastated by this. There were a bunch of middle age folk in the room. And one of the interesting things about having all those folk in the room is that some of them are in that sandwich generation. That are caught between raising kids and taking care of adults. Some concerned because they have parents that are in nursing homes, that are concerned about Medicaid being cut because that’s going to cut their grants. And at the same time, they’re also concerned about what this budget was going to do with education and Meals on Wheels and things of that nature. I mean, Meals on Wheels for parents that might be home but also cutting school lunches and things of that nature as well. So there was a sense that folk were like, yes, we’re going to get on the ground. We’re going to do this work.

You know, PICO National Network has a campaign called Families First. And really for us, we are basically saying in a very real way, we want hands off our families. And that this is destructive to our families. We believe in a vision of a beloved community where everybody is welcome to the table and it’s an inclusive environment and people are treated as human being and that all the distinct difference that are often talked about in negative ways in our country are actually points of blessing and opportunity. And so we want to paint a picture of our nation where people are all sharing and caring for one another and really building that up. I mean, we, from a faith tradition, as a Christian minister we often talk about that the concept of America was to be a city on a hill. And right now we’re not really demonstrating that. This budget is an example of how we are everything but a city on a hill and everything but a beloved community. But we really want to drive back to that and that’s what our people are longing for. They’re longing for hope, they’re longing for a vision that puts people above profits, puts families above profits and that really cares deeply about the wholeness of families in this nation.

VALLAS: Anna Chu, Donald Trump has talked, in some people’s minds, a good game when it comes to caring about women. And Ivanka Trump has been maybe a big piece of that. She’s got a book out, she’s been labeled by a lot of folks, sort of, his thinker in his administration even though she is part of his family as well. But in his administration on women’s issues and family issues. And a couple of the things in the budget that Trump is pointing to might include paid leave and child care where he says he’s keeping promises or that he’s looking out for women and families. What has the response from the women’s community been and should we be taking seriously what he’s been saying about keeping those promises?

ANNA CHU: I think what you’re going to see is a lot of women not buying it. Not buying what he’s selling. Because we have to start from the reality that we are not living single issue lives. Just because you give us a half measure around paid leave, and I’m happy to get into why his measure around paid leave is inadequate. Because you may give us a half measure on one item, it doesn’t begin to even make up for the litany of harms that’s happening. On the child care front, it’s a little bit complicated. But I think you’ll find the same simple story. Which is, it’s a disappointment and he’s not living up to his promises. So, there was actually, in the last budget for 2017 that was enacted, actually an increase in funding for Head Start and for direct child care assistance. He did not take that into account. So we actually have a cut from the most recent enacted budget. So it’s not even true that he gave us flat funding. No, it’s an actually cut because we actually got more money last time. And for something like child care, well, the thing is, the assistance for child care has been decreasing so much throughout the years, right. That really only five out of six people who are eligible for it, actually receive the assistance.

VALLAS: I think five out of the six don’t receive assistance.

CHU: Oh yes, excuse me, I’m sorry.

VALLAS: I wish it were five out of six.

CHU: I know, maybe I’m being too rosy. Too much kool-aid today.

VALLAS: We’ve got optimistic Anna.

CHU: Oh, that’s rare. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, five out of six families who should get it, do not get it right now. And because of the extra requirements that congress passed, unless — states have to do more with less money. So unless you are actually putting in a heck of a lot more money, I’m saying upwards of a billion dollars into the funding. Actually, much more. At the level it is right now you’re still losing kids. At the level we’re doing now, there’s actually going to be more families who are eligible who will not be able to get assistance.

VALLAS: So Bishop Dwayne, you have been talking with your field, not just about their reactions, not just about what they think about it, whether they feel like it’s keeping Trump’s promises. But also about what they’re going to do about it. And a lot of these folks are people who are organizers on issues to do with racial justice. Or issues to do with immigration and immigrant rights or issues to do, I mean really it’s spans all kinds of different issues. A lot of the focus, I think, of this budget and the budget narrative that’s been kind of out there in the media has been what happens to those white working class voters that everyone’s so obsessed with since November, right. The white working class voters. I’m rolling my eyes, you can’t see it, but you could if we had video going right now. But hasn’t been talked about so much is the impact on other communities aside from those white working class voters that are up on the pedestal because they voted for Trump in such numbers. How should we understand what this budget means for folks who maybe didn’t vote for Trump but I would argue matter just as much as those who did.

ROYSTER: Well I think, let me be clear that the budget; and I think we can’t take the budget in isolation. There are a series of actions that Donald Trump and his administration have done since January 20th, that make it very clear, he doesn’t care for people of color. He does not want them in this country. He does not care for anybody outside of his sort of, 1 percent class of friends that he is working to make sure that they get richer off of whatever limited wealth poor people and middle class people in this country still have. So when we think about the Muslim ban, and we think about that; that is a way that he’s trying to keep Muslims out of this country, right. And actually get some people deported. When we look at the investment, even in this particular budget that’s in deportation and detention. More boots on the ground for the border patrol, he’s making it very clear that he does not want brown folk and API folk who are in this country undocumented, and actually black folk too, because the Caribbean and African folk that are here in this nation, he does not want them here. When we take a look at the investments that Jeff Sessions and others are making in trying to increase incarceration, and we know that it disproportionately affects primarily, African-Americans now both males and females, in a very bad way. And also the Latino community.

So he’s attempting to profit off the misery of dark skinned bodies one way or the other, and make money for his friends who are invested in these corporations that he’s trying to privatize everything with. So, when we take a look at that, we look very clearly that he’s trying to destroy what I consider to be communities of color. He’s using dog-whistle language, he’s been very clear about using dog-whistle language both in the campaign and even now with it through the surrogates to basically use coded language to really talk about Medicaid, talk about disability, talk about food stamps, talk about Meals on Wheels of all things, talk about SNAP benefits in a way that makes more people have these images in their minds of a person of color that they think is somehow being lazy and milking the system. Even though the majority of the people that are actually on some of these benefits are actually the working poor. But we’re not telling that story. And what has actually been intriguing to me in all of this is that some of the very people who voted for him, his base, are going to be devastated by this budget. And devastated by the cuts that are coming.

I think part of the problem that we have in this moment, is that we need to have a real frank conversation about race and economics and about how the conservative element in our country has used race as a tool to try to hoodwink and bamboozle people into thinking that they only people that take advantage of these safety net programs are African-Americans and undocumented folks and API and indigenous folk that are in this nation. The reality is the majority of people that benefit from these programs are poor and working class white people, some of them in rural counties and communities across the country. Now, I think the challenge that we have is that often times people in this moment are ready to abandon the base, abandon people of color, to go run after and get white folk. My remark on this, and this is what we’ve been talking about in the PICO National Network and PICO Action Fund, has been very clearly that we need to build a deep multi-racial coalition that has race at the center. That has a race positive message, a beloved communities message, a families first message, that’s really talking about we’re in this fight together.

And we’re stronger together to be able to do the things that we need to do. To make our country into the new America that it needs to be; not make it great again, because I keep sometimes wondering when it was so great from folk that look like me, I’m African-American for those who can’t see on the radio. So, you know, but how do we make it a new America that becomes the highest idea of what America was supposed to be in the first place.

VALLAS: And there’s nothing more racialized without saying the words, but it straight dog-whistle, than the conversation around work requirements.

ROYSTER: Absolutely.

VALLAS: And that is at the heart of this budget. That is where it goes, it pulls from the Paul Ryan playbook and many people before him, going all the way back to the Gingrich congress and the Contract on America, I don’t like to say ‘with,’ in the early 1990s, mid 1990s that brought us what often gets called welfare reform but was really about taking away basics from families who couldn’t afford them and were struggling to make ends meet, but work requirements. It’s one of those things that sounds really good. It messages really well, right? It’s like oh, of course, we’re a nation of work, the dignity of work. Who could be against that? But the reality of what they’re trying to do is to say, you know what, people who have lost a job or can’t get enough hours at work, maybe they’re too sick to work or they have caregiving responsibilities. We’re going to say, you know what? You don’t actually get help when you need it because you’re not falling into our bucket of what we consider to be the ‘deserving poor,’ quote unquote. And it is so completely imbued with the Fox News conception of who is poor in this country, which is a black person sitting on a couch, eating bon bons, with a check from the government, right? So what I’m curious is, and I’d love to hear from both of you because there’s both racial and gender components to this. How do we as progressives, stand united rather than playing right into this by letting them divide and conquer us?

CHU: I think you know, honestly, the Hands Off campaign, what we’re doing now, you know, what we’re calling for. This is the first step. This is the first step in saying that this is really an attack that he’s making on all of us, right. Because let’s be very serious — there are many, many, many families that are really just one paycheck away from the brink, right. If, for whatever reason, there was an accident that happened, they couldn’t get to work, their child care arrangement fell through, you know, a whole; they got sick. So many different things. And so they missed one paycheck, that means they’re late on rent. They’re getting kicked out. That means they have to decide between whether to keep the heating on or buy food. So this is really all of us. And this fallacy as you said, of like who the poor person is. Let’s be real. There are severe, severe structural problem with our economy. It is completely off balance in terms of who gets rewarded, who you know, and how things get rewarded. And then the fact that you have families and parents struggling with two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Like, that’s what happening right now. It’s that you have poverty wage jobs. So you have hard working people working to the bone. And you have CEO, like getting rich and sitting in board rooms say, how do we streamline? How do we make sure that we, our stock prices go up? Let’s, you know, let’s put everyone to part time. Let’s cut hours, let’s do this.

VALLAS: Because it’s all about profits for the shareholders.

CHU: Yeah. and so there is no divide between us and like, the deserving poor, the undeserving poor. We are all in this situation and that’s what we have to do right now. And that’s why I think the Hands Off campaign is important. Because we need to tell people and show people, no, no, no, like you’re not segmenting us. You’re actually trying to take us all down.

VALLAS: Bishop Dwayne.

ROYSTER: Yeah, you know it’s actually interesting when you think about the work requirements. I remember when the work requirements came in law and we actually, I was running another non-profit at the time and there were companies that were scrambling to try to find jobs for the folk that were receiving welfare. And actually if you were to go back and take a look, they work 20 hours a week to be able to get their benefits at that time. And if you took a look at the amount of money they were making from welfare, and I’m thinking I was in the state of Pennsylvania at that time. That they were actually working for less than minimum wage. Without benefits, without some of the other benefits that are afforded people that actually work on a regular basis. Many of them had children. Now, if you take away like this budget does, not everybody’s going to get some of those child care, you know, credits and opportunities for that. If you don’t have the money to pay for child care, how do you work 20 hours a week? If you’re trying to figure out how to put food on the table, you need to pay for public transportation, you need to be able to get clothes to be able to go into a professional environment. Where are all these things coming from? I mean this falls disproportionately on women of color. Let’s be honest, right. This is deeply racialized and gendered, genderized if I can make that a word, at the same time. I think we have to really wrestle with that. I just want to say, you know I’m from Philadelphia, so you know, Rebecca and I —

VALLAS: One of the reasons I love you. There are many, there are many.

ROYSTER: We’re both from Philly. So Philadelphia is the poorest big city in America. We have the deepest poverty of any major city in the country. Almost thirty percent of the population is in poverty. We have the largest deep poverty of any city size in the country, 12.5 percent of the population lives off of less than 5,000 dollars a year. Now of a city of 1.6 million people, we’re talking about a significant number of people that are living off of less than 5,000 dollars a year. What that story doesn’t really tell is the fact that there are people that live just above the poverty line that does not allow them to get benefits. If you really take the working folks that are just above poverty in Philadelphia, it’s almost 50 percent of the population. Now, some of them are struggling. They have Medicaid as insurance because they might have to cobble together two or three jobs. None of the jobs, they meet the work requirements to get benefits. They might have some food assistance to be able to get food stamps or SNAP benefits through that. Some of them might be using Medicaid to help take care of a parent that they had to put in a nursing home. Or, and I used to be a geriatric social worker so I know this very well. That there were waivers given so that people could stay in community, but they would provide services at home. You cut all that stuff out you are decimating 50 percent of the population of the city of Philadelphia. That is a majority African-American city, a majority people of color city; over 60 percent of the population is Black and Latino.

But you’re aso devastating, and I have to keep saying this over and over again, and I think the folk that followed Donald Trump need to understand this, because he is motivated about trying to attack people of color, he is going to drag a lot of poor white folk with them in this process. And I’m not doing that to center whiteness, I’m not doing that. I’m contrasting and making a very loud statement to all the folk out there that think he is so wonderful. When we talked about Obamacare everybody was like, oh it’s terrible, until people started realizing they were losing their ACA. there’s a whole town in West Virginia, voted Trump, all the sudden they found out Obamacare is ACA and half of them are getting ready to lose their health insurance. They’re having a fit. This is the problem that we’re having in this moment. The fact that they’re using racialized lenses, negative racialized lenses that continued to get people to buy into these plans that they have, these policies that they have. In reality, we’ve got to flip the script on that. And first of all say, we’re all Americans and from the PICO National Network, our perspective on Americans, not whether you’re documented or not, it’s whether you’re here and you desire to be a productive part of our society that’s trying to produce something wonderful.

And so if you’re here, to us, that’s all Americans and we’re excited about that but we have to recognize that America is not white, it’s not Black it’s not just indigenous, it’s just Latino, it’s not just Asian Pacific Islander, it’s not biracial people, it’s all of us together. And we have to create a vision, an economic vision that’s about all of us, not just a handful of folk like Donald Trump and his cronies and the people that he thinks are following him right now that are going to sell out everybody else and in particular people of color, in particular women, in particular LGBTQ folk, in particular a whole swath of people that are not considered normative in this country. We’ve got to push back on that and say no, we’re not going to tolerate this. Hands off our families, hands off our Medicaid, hands off our Social Security, hands off our disability, hands off our child care, hands off all these things that are not only just going to decimate one segment of our society but the majority of our society.

VALLAS: Bishop Dwayne Royster is the political director at PICO National Network and PICO Action, Anna Chu is the Vice President of I don’t even know, income security and other things that I care about over at the National Women’s Law Center. In the last minute that we have I would love for you guys to help us understand and help listeners understand how they can get involved. Obviously we’d love for folks to go to HandsOff.org to share their story. To talk about what the Trump budget cuts would mean for them and for their families and their communities. But if you guys have additional plugs you’d like to make for how folks can get involved now is your chance. Anna, I’ll start with you.

CHU: Sure. National Women’s Law Center has a weekly ‘We the Resistance’ newsletter that we send out to inform people how we can get engaged. So calls to action they can make, what are the fights of the day, what are the fights of the week. And actually, we featured Hands Off in our latest newsletter. But you can go to NWLC.org to sign up for the newsletter, to get the resistence, but I think like, it’s important that we all get engaged because we know the calls are working. The showing up to town halls are working. The letters are working and we need to keep this up.

VALLAS: Bishop Dwayne.

ROYSTER: Yes, I want to invite people to go to, first of all the HandsOff.org website, go check that out and get information there but also to check out the PICO National Network; PICOnetwork.org, PICO Network, all one word, dot org. And you know, in particular our base are people of faith. Multiple faith traditions, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Ethical Humanist, Unitarian Universalists, Quaker, we have 48 different denominations and faith traditions that are part of our work. If you are a person of faith and you want to get engaged in the work. Now PICO, we believe in boots on the ground. So we actually, you know, are going to get engaged, we’re going to make some visits to our congressional leaders, our senators. We’re going to make sure we’re coming to DC and doing their home offices. We’re going to make phone calls. We’re going to send letters. We will do actions. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure they get the point about what their people want and get engaged. You can sign up for our newsletter on there, but even more importantly, if you’re in a area where there is not a PICO National Network Federation and you’re interested in being a part of our movement, we want to invite you to reach out to us. You can reach out to me personally at the PICO National Network at DRoyster@PICOnetwork.org. And we would love to talk with you and figure out ways that we can partner you with other congregations in your area, begin to build a base that actually is building long term progressive power to be able to change our nation.

VALLAS: Thank you so much both for your partnership in this campaign, for your leadership on these issues, and for joining CAP and all of our progressive allies and allies really across the advocacy world in saying hands off programs that make it possible for families to afford the basics, for tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Sing it with me. [LAUGHTER] Thanks to you both I look forward to having you back

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. As part of his budget, as we discussed earlier in this episode, Trump calls for cutting Social Security. Of course, folks will remember back during the campaign, before he was President Trump, he promised time and again not to cut Social Security alongside his promises not to cut Medicare and Medicaid. I think we’ve learned at this point what his promises are worth, especially in the context of the health care fight. But let’s cue that clip just to refresh our recollection.

[START CLIP]

DONALD TRUMP: I will do everything within my power not to touch Social Security.

[END CLIP]

VALLAS: So with me to discuss what the significance of this broken promise is and how Mick Mulvaney is trying to tell the media and the American public that it’s not actually a broken promise and why everything he’s saying is BS is Alex Lawson. He is the fearless leader of Social Security Works, that’s the hat he needs to have on today for this conversation. Alex, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

ALEX LAWSON: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: So, Mick Mulvaney has found a creative, let’s call it creative, to try to spin Trump’s budget which does indeed cut Social Security for reasons we’ll explain. As not breaking Trump’s promise. And he’s done it by saying there’s this thing called ‘core’ Social Security; quote unquote core Social Security and that that’s what Trump was promising not to cut. And this budget, which cuts Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, it’s not cutting ‘core’ Social Security. What’s wrong with what Mick Mulvaney is saying?

LAWSON: Well, first of all, it isn’t really a novel strategy because it is just an old trick of politicians which is called lying. [LAUGHTER] He’s just lying. Trump is a liar. Mulvaney is a liar. Paul Ryan is a liar that gets off on other people’s pain. All these people are liars. So, the way that they’re lying is by making up something that doesn’t exist. So there is no such thing as ‘core’ Social Security and peripheral Social Security. There’s one Social Security. It’s the one that we all know because we pay for it. We see it come out of our paychecks. We earn this insurance product that actually protects against the loss of wages due to three things. One is completely predictable; the loss of wages because we become older and we retire. That’s a lot of people think of Social Security is that. But that’s not all there is to Social Security. We also are insured against the loss of wages due to a life altering disability. And we are insured, our family will receive benefits if the breadwinner is killed.

VALLAS: Or dies for some other reason.

LAWSON: Yes, dies, yes.

VALLAS: You just brought it to like this really dark place so I wanted to — [LAUGHTER]

LAWSON: Dies, for any reason.

VALLAS: This is the mood you’re in this week Alex, I understand.

LAWSON: No but I mean, anyways. I don’t think a lot of people understand that like, Nancy Altman’s book, she opens September 11th, 2001. And she points out that the checks that went to the families of those who were killed in the attacks on September 11th, the first assistance, the first thing that families received were Social Security Survivor’s benefits. And that is often the case. People who are killed in war, their families receive their Social Security Survivor’s benefits. But it is; it’s the loss of a breadwinner due to anything. This is what the insurance product is. And it’s just one thing, and they’re all core, and we paid for them all, right. So disability insurance is 60, you tell me, 60 something years old now.

VALLAS: Yeah.

LAWSON: It’s, this is not a new, novel thing. And it is mine. And so when he’s cutting it, he’s reaching into my pocket and stealing my money. And Donald Trump didn’t promise anything about core, periphery, retirement, pension. The media are driving me insane with this by figuring out how much they can contort themselves to fit the press release coming out of the White House. No. Donald Trump promised not to cut Social Security. Donald Trump’s budget cuts Social Security. Therefore, he is a liar. Q.E.D. That’s how it works.

VALLAS: So, respecting you for ending with Q.E.D., which I feel like we should bring back instead of drop the mic. So but, take this, I actually appreciate that you said this is not a new tactic, right. And it’s not just lying that’s not a new tactic, it’s also divide and conquer that’s not a new tactic. And so this to me feels like it’s straight out of the divide and conquer playbook where Mick Mulvaney; and he didn’t decide this, by the way, the day the budget was coming out. We saw months ago he was doing national media Sunday shows; out there talking to the press. Paving the way for what we knew were going to be Social Security cuts in the President’s budget, masquerading as something else that didn’t break his promise. He was out there on Face the Nation saying, well disability insurance isn’t really Social Security, it’s this welfare thing and it’s out of control. He was repeating all the myths that the media like to repeat.

LAWSON: Lies.

VALLAS: Thank you, thank you, keep me honest here so to speak. But divide and conquer is what this is really about. The hope behind this strategy is that if enough of the American people can be persuaded that Donald Trump has not broken one of his signature campaign promises not to cut what is arguably the most popular program in the history of the United States government, then they won’t have buyer’s remorse and think that he broke a promise they counted on when they voted for him.

LAWSON: I’ll take it in the slightly darker direction. That this is, so it is divide and conquer, which is the oldest trick in the book. It actually is ancient. You can go back and read Greek tyrants talking about it, pitting one half of the people against the other half of the people. Cruces talked about it, so this is very old. And another of the oldest things, you can read all about it because we’ve got lots of history on this is bullying. It’s actually picking on assaulting, hurting, oppressing, punching in the face a weaker person while looking at the other people and being like do you see what I’m doing. You don’t want this to happen to you, do you? So that is, there’s a reason that they’re picking on what they see as the quote unquote weaker part of Social Security. They think they can scare everybody else into saying oh, that’s not my stuff so I’m going to just protect my own and that is, that is a also, it’s also not new to Mick Mulvaney or anything. Paul Ryan’s been after this, Fox News, Fox Business; there is actually an industry that basically yearly tries to do this and you know, Washington Post carrying water for it all the time. And again, a lot of it is just trying to intimidate people into giving up their own money. Which is just extortion is what it comes down to. And I think that they miss, they don’t understand just how strongly people feel about Social Security. They don’t understand how well our opposition to this has been built. They don’t understand that we have been standing in solidarity together for literally, for years. And we’ve been standing against any Democratic attempts to do this, Republican attempts to do this, anyone who comes and tries to take our Social Security is going to face the wrath that we have organized against them.

VALLAS: And you’re saying we, but I think it’s good to be clear, because I think this is illustrative of what you’re describing and the coalition that has been built over the years. And that is amazingly strong, one of the strongest in the progressive world, really is evidence of what you’re talking about. It’s the strength in Social Security coalition, right? It’s groups across the progressive spectrum, it’s seniors groups, it’s groups that care about retirees, but it’s also groups that care about people with disabilities and represent those folks. It’s people who care about kids and families, it’s labor, it’s all of it.

LAWSON: Veterans.

VALLAS: Veterans, I should name veterans.

LAWSON: And it’s not just progressive. It is an enormous spectrum, it’s a broad, I’m not just going to use what we call the coalition. It literally shows and demonstrates the beauty and the power and the brilliance of Social Security in that it’s universality is one of its greatest protectors.

VALLAS: Now, I’m going to cut you off because I think it’s; some people might be hearing you say this and feel like you he’s being histrionic by saying oh, there’s a wrath or oh, that this is about bullying people. But what you’re saying is very literal. The assumption baked into this is you know what, if we come after one part that we have wagered is the weakest part or the part with the weakest constituency behind it, of this system, then you know what, the folks who care about, say, the retirement benefits are going to say well I better hold onto my piece because I’m really scared that he’s going to come after my piece. And so you end up pitting advocacy communities literally against each other. Where, well, I guess we’re just going to be silent on this because we’re not touched and we’re ok. But that’s not what we’re seeing come out of this. So what’s been the response to this broken promise in this budget?

LAWSON: Well, we’ve had years of building good faith partnerships. Not just within the Social Security world, in solidarity standing with — if they’re coming after Meals on Wheels, that doesn’t not affect us, right? You make student debt follow someone to the grave so you can garnish Social Security benefits, that affects us. So we see Social Security as incredibly broad based. It’s economic security. So we’re going to stand in solidarity against any of these cuts. They always try, just to go quickly to D.C. speak, they always try to pit mandatory against discretionary, NDD, and they’re like, oh you know, at least you’re not — that’s not going to work anymore either because we see that we only win when we get out of this, we’re going to fight for scraps that fall off of the table, that the Wall St. billionaires are eating at. See, I didn’t say greedy liars on Wall St.

VALLAS: You are keeping me on my toes, Alex Lawson. So one of the things that I’m very curious about from where I sit is what are we going to see in the days and weeks ahead? We’re coming up on a recess. Folks may be listening to this episode as they’re gearing up for town halls or for other kinds of actions in their districts because their members of congress are going to be home. Maybe they’re going to be hiding in the bushes, Spicer style, maybe they’re going to be fleeing the country like Rick Perry and Donald Trump and others who don’t want to defend this budget but this is what a lot of folks are thinking about right now is how can I be telling my member of congress what I think about this budget and what I think about what should be in the congressional budgets which are going to be soon to follow, probably in a few weeks if not months. So what are we going to be seeing when folks start activating around recess?

LAWSON: Anger, righteous anger that is rightly placed. So don’t let, for anyone who is going to these town halls; first of all if they hide from you, hold the town hall without them. That’s my favorite tactic now. Invite a democratic congressperson from nearby or a candidate who wants to run against them or just put some honest person in the seat and have an empty chair for the cowards who won’t defend what they’re doing. I also want to point out that they will quickly say, oh well this budget is dead in the water, it’s DOA, it’s da-da-da-da-da, and just put right pack. Don’t yell at them, you can, but reasonably yell at them and make sure you get it on video so you can post on social media. This is an aspirational document, you’re right, this isn’t exactly what’s going to come out but this is your vision. So you aspire to steal all of my money. That doesn’t make me feel better. And what they try to do is put something that’s kind of, way out there, so then what the congressional budget actually does look somewhat reasonable compared to it, and don’t let them get away with that. Don’t let them try to distance themselves from Donald Trump’s budget. Donald Trump is their president. He is the leader of the Republican party. This budget is their budget. If they want it, they can’t distance themselves, they can try to defeat it. They can work to defeat this budget, that will be a real thing.

They can’t be ‘concerned’ by it, or any of those things that we’re seeing, you know, the amount of Republicans who are concerned by things right now, it’s just a meaningless phrase. And Democrats too. Like, I’m not interested in what you’re concerned about, i’m interested in action. So let’s see some action on this. That is, don’t let them get away with that one. That is the like, second talking point. So first they try to say, oh no we’re not going to steal your money, we’re just going to steal your money. And then when you catch them on it, they’re like oh, well we’re not actually going to steal everything we put down in the document, that’s just what we want to do, we’re only going to steal about a tenth of that and be like, yeah well I don’t want you stealing any of my money. In fact I want to tax Donald Trump and the billionaires in his cabinet and the Walton family and the rest of the richest Americans, tax them and instead of having an upward redistribution of wealth, which is what this budget is. And we should be clear. That’s what it does. It takes money out of our pockets and puts it into the pockets of billionaires, hundreds of billionaires who will benefit to the tune of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and everyone else is just left out.

VALLAS: Yeah, we heard earlier in this show, fifteen million dollars per person when we’re talking about the volume of tax cuts going to the wealthiest four hundred people in this country. Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works. I wish I could have him for another hour because I’m getting fired up, but Alex thank you so much for doing what you do every day to protect Social Security, to fight to expand Social Security, and to hold the media accountable when they get it as wrong as they did this week.

LAWSON: Well, thanks for having me and just to end on a positive note, we only lose when we forget what we’re fighting for, and that’s why I’m extremely certain that we’re going to win.

VALLAS: Always great to have you, thanks Alex. 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 Eliza Schultz. 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.