On February 10, 2020 President Trump submitted his Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 budget recommendations to Congress. This budget plan betrays President Trump's promise "not to touch" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Specifically, this budget calls for:
• Slashing $478 billion from Medicare over a decade;
• Gutting Medicaid with some $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years, which undermines seniors' access to long-term care services;
• Cutting Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits by $90 billion over 10 years;
• Reducing block grant funding for vital Meals on Wheels programs, which deliver two million hot meals to seniors each year; and
• Eliminating programs that help lower-income adults get community service jobs and help seniors with heating costs.
During a press conference to express her disapproval of President Trump's budget, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi quoted directly from the National Committee's press release, saying this budget "would leave seniors and other vulnerable citizens hungrier, sicker and poorer."
One would hope that in an election year when politicians like to put forward their most popular ideas, the President would understand the benefits of protecting our most cherished income and health security programs. It's time he delivers what the American people have been asking for, as indicated by poll after poll, and not the dangerous proposals of his fiscal axe-men.
This budget foreshadows a broader attack on seniors' earned benefits that President Trump hinted at in a recent interview, when he said that cutting "entitlements" is "the easiest of all things." Older Americans and our nation's most vulnerable citizens should not be expected to pay for policies that favor the very wealthy and big corporations, most notably the Trump-GOP tax law of 2017, which exploded budget deficits and handed out massive tax cuts mainly to the richest Americans.
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