Apparently Tax and Spending Cuts are Either Too Small or Too Big, but Never Just Right: New at Reason

Advocates of ever increasing spending will never meet a cut they won’t overreact to.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider and former liberal Democrat, and Ed Gillespie, the ultimate insider and GOP veteran, are about as different as two people in the same party could be. But when it comes to taxing and spending, opponents are giving them the same old business.

Last week Trump unveiled his budget outline, which jacks up military spending—though not nearly as much as critics allege: His Pentagon proposal is only 3 percent bigger than what Barack Obama sought. To offset his defense hike, Trump has proposed cuts in other domestic programs, from the Appalachian Regional Commission to the Weatherization Assistance Program.

The screams of liberal protest still echo through the hills. Some progressives have been horrified to learn the administration might eliminate agencies they had never heard of in the first place. And many have pointed out that the budgets for those and other agencies are, in relation to aggregate federal spending, minuscule.

The combined budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, complained one critic in Slate, “total under $300 million, which is less than 0.01 percent of the total federal budget.” The Washington Post took this tack as well. When White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said the administration did not want to ask a coal miner or a single mom to pay for programs on the chopping block, the paper’s fact-checker retorted with “A Coal Miner’s Plight: Paying for Public Broadcasting Is Less Than a Dollar of His Taxes.”

You get the point: Cuts to small agencies make no real difference—so don’t cut them.

So does this mean Trump’s critics favor big cuts that will make a difference? Perish the thought!

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