That’s how President Donald Trump’s budget proposal represents support for his campaign commitment to protect programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

[The proposal] 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 federal disability benefits.

Medicare is threatened with bankruptcy nearly as badly as is Social Security, but that doesn’t mean Medicare would disappear—only that benefit payouts would be reduced to what payroll tax revenues could support, rather than what’s currently available from those tax revenues plus earnings and principle from its trust funds.

By tightening eligibility requirements and by requiring actual work, efforts toward being able to gain work, or doing forms of community service benefits those who actually need the benefits would be preserved.

The same situation exists for Medicaid: these State-run programs threaten the fiscal health of those States, and Federal transfers to those States, far from helping them, do nothing but reduce the States to dependencies of the Federal government.

One item in the proposed budget with which I disagree with Trump concerns the VA.

Winners in Mr Trump’s budget include the Department of Veterans Affairs, with a 13% increase next year….

This is a waste of money. The VA has repeatedly shown itself incapable of taking care of our veterans with any generality or reliability.  The VA needs to be completely disbanded and its budget (this year with that 13% increase) and putative future budgets converted to vouchers for our veterans so they can get the medical care and financial support they need at the time they need it from doctors, clinics, and hospitals that suit them.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.