Trump Admits He Plans to Cut Social Security & Medicare Then Tries to Deny He Said It

If there is anything admirable about Donald Trump, it's that he can't keep his mouth shut even when he knows he should. During a Fox News town hall on Thursday, President Trump said he planned to propose cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, saying “Oh, we’ll be cutting,” in response to a question about the entitlement programs and the federal budget deficit.

There is other evidence of his intention to cut these popular and important safety net programs, along with food stamps and medicaid, if he wins a second term. He made similar comments in a CNBC interview in January.

CNBC Interview with Trump, Twitter: CNBC: Will entitlements ever be on your plate [for cutting]?

TRUMP: "At some point they will be"

CNBC: But you said you wouldn't do that in the past

TRUMP: "We also have assets that we never had"

And the President's recent budget proposal contains a collection of cuts to entitlement spending.

Vox quoting the Wall Street Journal: "The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to disability benefits."

Yesterday, Trump tried to backtrack on his Fox town hall comments by claiming that he had been misquoted, but his comments and intentions seem quite clear.

Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also taken aim at safety net programs, blaming them for the deficit rather than the massive corporate tax cut Republicans rammed through Congress in 2017.

The Hill: "McConnell said the true culprit behind the rising deficits was mandatory spending."

“The three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, that’s 70 percent of what we spend every year,” he said in a separate interview with Bloomberg TV. “There’s been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs.”

For more about Republican plans to cut Social Security, and the future of the program, please see economist Teresa Ghilarducci's thoughtful article in Forbes.

#news #socialsecurity

By: Don Lam & Curated Content