Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year was released on Monday, and it’s just as bad as you can imagine.
In it, Trump proposes gutting social safety-net programs, like food stamps, while at the same time working to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with the same health care bill Republicans failed to pass in 2017, which would kick 21 million Americans off the insurance rolls.
Trump’s budget also proposes further health care cuts, including nixing zero-premium plans on the ACA exchanges and demanding that all Americans “contribute something.” That could raise costs for millions of poorer Americans who currently pay $0 in health care subsidies in the ACA exchange.
Health care advocates have panned Trump’s proposals, including the Federation of American Hospitals, which said Trump’s proposed changes would have a “devastating” impact on seniors.
On top of health care cuts, Trump also proposed slashing $220 billion over the next 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — better known as food stamps.
That’s a huge cut from a program that helps the poorest Americans eat.
Because the admin has withheld information, we can't yet calculate percent cuts, but as you can see, those SNAP cuts are large and immediate. We're talking on the order of a 1/4 cut to SNAP. How disgusting. I don't care who you are or what you've done. No one should go hungry. pic.twitter.com/2bBfKKt4y0
— Bobby Kogan (@BBKogan) March 11, 2019
In all, Trump’s budget proposes cutting $327 billion from social safety net programs over the next 10 years.
Of course, because Democrats have control of the House, a repeal of the ACA and massive cuts to the social safety net won’t happen in the next two years.
But Trump’s budget makes his priorities clear: He wants to spend billions on his needless border wall and jails for immigrants, all while cutting health care and other vital benefits to millions of Americans.
“The president’s budget is a continuation of the administration’s years-long war on Americans’ health care and a return to the failed policy of repeal – exactly what Americans voted against in 2018,” Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care, said in a statement.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
Stephen Colbert isn’t impressed by the grandiose title affixed to Trump’s first federal budget, “A New Foundation For American Greatness,” and notes that the president and his budget director Mick Mulvaney are “building that new foundation for American greatness on the ground-up bones of poor people.”
Among the many cuts that violate decency are huge reductions in SNAP, the food stamp program, and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program created by the late Senator Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, back in 1997 when she was first lady. (It has saved millions of children’s lives since then.)
“I know this is an unpopular position these days,” Colbert confesses, “but I believe children should go to the doctor and eat. Where do I find the courage?” He also points out the irony that seems to have occurred to everyone but the #MAGA crowd, namely that this budget “is particularly cruel to one minority group: Trump’s voters.”
And he’s worried by the ruinous spending cuts slated for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control: “Whenever that thing inside Steve Bannon bursts out and goes airborne, we won’t be prepared for it.”
It’s funny, if you take your humor very dark.
Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.
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