Josh Dawsey, Damian Paletta – The Washington Post
Trump demands action to reduce deficit, pushes new spending
President Trump is demanding top advisers craft a plan to reduce the country’s ballooning budget deficits, but the president has flummoxed his own aides by repeatedly seeking new spending while ruling out measures needed to address the country’s unbalanced budget.
Trump’s deficit-reduction directive came last month, after the White House reported a large increase in the deficit for the previous 12 months. The announcement unnerved Republicans and investors, helping fuel a big sell-off in the stock market. Two days after the deficit report, Trump floated a surprise demand to his Cabinet secretaries, asking them to identify steep cuts in their agencies.
This account of Trump’s deficit stance is based on conversations with 10 current and former officials in the White House and Congress. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations or private conversations. The White House has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Administration officials have, for now, crafted a sparse plan that would recycle past proposals and call on Congress to trim federal spending on a variety of programs, two White House officials said.
But even as he has demanded deficit reduction, Trump has handcuffed his advisers with limits on what measures could be taken. And almost immediately after demanding the cuts from his Cabinet secretaries, Trump suggested that some areas — particularly the military — would be largely spared.
The president has said no changes can be made to Medicare and Social Security, two of the government’s most expensive entitlements, as he has promised that the popular programs will remain untouched.
When staffers sought to include an attack on Democrats’ Medicare-for-all proposals in Trump’s campaign speeches this fall, he initially blanched, two administration aides said. Medicare is popular, he said, and voters want it. Eventually, he agreed to the attack if he could say Democrats were going to take the entitlement away.
He has suggested that military spending could be curtailed slightly, from $716 billion this year to $700 billion in his next proposal, a smaller reduction than other agencies would face.
The plan is not expected to include large-scale tax increases, which would be a non-starter with congressional Republicans.
In total, government debt has risen roughly $2 trillion since Trump took office, and the federal government now owes $21.7 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. The president’s agenda has contributed to that increase and is projected to continue to do so, both through the GOP tax cut and with bipartisan spending increases.
And Trump’s recent interest in the issue is at odds with his long-standing previous indifference, according to current and former aides.
Three former senior administration officials said the deficit issue was rarely brought up in Trump’s presence because he had no interest in discussing it.
When former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn’s staffers prepared a presentation for Trump about deficits, Cohn told them no. It wouldn’t be necessary, he said, because the president did not care about deficits, according to current and former officials.
Trump also repeatedly told Cohn to print more money, according to three White House officials familiar with his comments.
“He’d just say, run the presses, run the presses,” one former senior administration official said, describing the president’s Oval Office orders. “Sometimes it seemed like he was joking, and sometimes it didn’t.”
Two current aides said they had not heard Trump make that comment in recent months, and he is changing his tune on the budget in public statements.
“We’re going to start paying down debt,” Trump said during a White House event last month. “We have a lot of debt.”
Trump often uses “debt” — the total amount the government owes — to refer to the deficit, the annual gap between what the government takes in and what it spends.
Trump also is often not versed in the particulars of the federal budget.
Chief of Staff John F. Kelly has told others about watching television with Trump and asking the president how much the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns. Trump guessed $5 million, according to people who were told the story by Kelly, startling the chief of staff. Kelly responded that he made less than $200,000. The president suggested he get a large raise and noted the number of stars on his uniform.
The man was enrolled at The Wharton School and has a BS in Economics. Enrolled, maybe but you have to wonder who he paid to attend classes and take his exams because he as acutely ignorant of anything business wise.
He actually thought that a Marine general could make 5 million!!??
OBAMA is not a foreign born, brown skinned, anti war socialist who gives away health care. YOU'RE THINKING OF JESUS.
Desert_Fox 51 minutes ago.
basilfawlty.
(@ALT_uscis) November 19, 2018</p>
