Budget Assumptions

"We Can't Ask Them to Pay"

One of the most disturbing comments made in defense of President Trump's proposed budget cuts came from his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who stated: “When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was, ‘Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?’ The answer was ‘No.’ We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” 

Yes, you can ask them, but you haven't. You have assumed that their answer would be no. That those stereotypical middle Americans, the coal miner and the inner city parent, wouldn't agree to continue having a portion of their hard earned tax dollars  pay for  PBS or  the National Endowment for the Arts or the NASA Education Program or Collective Block Grants for  Meals on Wheels.  So you cut those items from the budget, and you answered for them. No. 

Because if you had asked them, they might have said yes.  They might tell you that supporting the arts and science and education and healthcare - not just wars and walls -  is what American citizens in a democracy do.  They pay taxes for the greater good, in order to "promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty" for themselves and their children.  The preamble assumes more of us than simply to "provide for the common defense".  Yet the current budget assumes defense is a given, but that certain citizens can't be asked, in fact, assumes they don't care about programs such as  media free of corporate interference, or culture, or science, or food.

Do those who made the budget cuts assume  that a "coal miner in West Virginia" is too ignorant to watch PBS?   Is it not possible that a coal miner could want something more for his posterity than to follow Dad into the same dangerous and poorly paid job?  Is it not possible that the coal miner's son  learned to play the fiddle through the National Endowment for the Arts program at West Virginia's Barboursville Middle School?   A school that received stringed instruments valued at $35,000 from the NEA's  VH1 Save The Music Foundation and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Is the assumption made on the coal miner's behalf that when he comes home from a day underground, he doesn't have time to watch the replay of his daughter's W. Virginia public school classroom speaking to  NASA astronauts  aboard the International Space Station?

And then there is the iconic image of the "single mom in Detroit", who according to Mr. Mulvaney, is more willing to pay for defense than she is for PBS or any of the other programs to be cut in her name.  Is it not possible that her aging mother is eating nutritious food delivered by a the Meals and Wheels branch outside of Detroit, where the community block grants make up 30% of it's budget?  Is it not possible that the single mom worries that her mother might have her two meals a day cut down to one?  Isn't it possible that this  "single Mom",  logs on to PBS parents to learn how to encourage her toddler's curiosity?

If our President and his advisors can ask us to pay for defense when we already devote over three fourths of our budget to that nebulous priority, if he can ask us to pay for a wall he promised we wouldn't have to pay for, if he can ask us to fund his weekend home and his NYC home, then he can certainly ask us how we feel about supporting the arts, and science, and educational television and meals for the elderly.  But he hasn't asked us.  He has assumed. And by doing so, he has made the possible, impossible.