Trump Wants to Cut Medicare By 10%

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You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

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In real-world terms, the president’s budget doesn’t matter. It will be completely ignored by Congress and won’t even provide a baseline for discussions. Still, it does provide a look at the president’s priorities:

The budget also calls on increased military spending [and] for the first time calls for cutting $845 billion from Medicare, the popular health care program for the elderly that in the past he had largely said he would protect.

That isn’t peanuts: it’s about 10 percent of total Medicare spending. (As usual with budgets, this is a ten-year number, not a cut for a single year.) In fact, this is so far from being peanuts that it’s nearly insane. Did Mick Mulvaney put this in without Trump knowing about it? Or is Trump testing the theory that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his fans wouldn’t care?

Anyway, this provides a great opportunity for creative attack ads from Democrats. We’ve already used images of pushing granny off a cliff, so we’ll have to come up with something different. Concrete shoes for granny?