Shooting The Bird

While the Trump boys, Eric and Donald Jr., display their manly courage by having a tour guide take them by their hands to shoot fenced-in big game animals, Daddy Trump prefers bigger game.

Trump unveiled his proposed budget and it contains $54 billion in cuts all across the federal government to make up for increases mostly in defense spending. There’s also increases in Homeland Protection and Veteran Affairs.

What does he plan to cut? The State department (28%) and Environment Protection Agency (31%) will see huge cuts. There will be further cuts in HUD (13%), Transportation (12%), Health & Human Services (16%), Education (13%), Labor (20%), Agriculture (20%), Army Corps of Engineers (16%), Institute of Health (20%), Commerce (15%), and Interior (11%).

It also eliminates further programs in Waste & Water, Education, Science, NASA, FEMA, Affordable Housing, and payments to the United Nations’ climate change programs. Amtrak will also suffer. There will be decreased support to the World Bank and it cuts funding to the Clean Power Plan entirely.

It also eliminates ALL federal funding for Meals on Wheels (it does have other funding that’s not from the government), PBS, African Development, Appalachian Commission, before-and after-school programs, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Chesapeake Bay funding (hope you don’t like oysters or it shucks for you), Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, NASA’s Office of Education, and a hell of a lot of other programs. How long do you want this blog?

Basically the United States will get dumber, poor kids will get hungrier, and the Earth will get dirtier. But hey, our depleted military will finally be rebuilt.

Wait. What? Depleted military? I’m getting tired of hearing Trump and other Republicans bemoan our “depleted” military. Our military is the largest on the planet. In 2014 our nation spent $610 billion on defense. That’s 34% of what the rest of the world spends on their military. That’s nearly three times higher than China, the second-highest nation with an estimated $216 billion in defense spending.

The United States has 19 aircraft carriers (though the military says only 12 count as carriers). The rest of the world combined has nine and most of those aren’t close to American quality. Do you think Thailand’s one aircraft carrier scares the U.S. Navy?

There’s a lot of stuff that can be cut in the federal budget. Most of those departments targeted by Trump could probably do with some cuts. But to wipe out education, science, diplomacy (cuts to security for embassies and consulates, you know…kind of like the one that was in Benghazi), and even funding to the NYPD which is facing brutal costs protecting Melania while she stays in Trump Tower, is just ridiculous. It’s especially absurd to choose walls over books, food, clean air, science, stuff like that.

A lot of this spending will go toward Trump’s stupid border wall that will be soundly defeated by immigrants with shovels and ladders.

Trump and Republicans will focus on making America dumb again (dumber which will probably be more beneficial to their reelections than gerrymandering) and more polluted, but we’ll have the biggest guns in the world. Our military will also continue to have $38 screws, $7,600 coffee pots, $640 toilet seats, etc. Take that, Thailand!

Creative note: You have to extend me some creative license here. I know Big Bird and the rest of his Sesame Street cohorts are on HBO now and are no longer with PBS. But their image still represents educational programming as they were on public broadcasting for over 45 years.

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