Trump Wants to Cut Medicare By 10%

Al Drago/CNP via ZUMA

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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?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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