"It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country." He went on to express his disdain, never before stated so bluntly, for the popular and vital programs that he brushed aside as "all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place. ... You have to let states take care of them."
Never mind that states could not begin to raise the tax revenue required to finance Medicare, a federal budget item well north of $1 trillion annually and steadily rising as our population ages, let alone Medicaid too. Did Trump mean to suggest that the states should cover the monthly Social Security checks, the program that he and his billionaire henchman Elon Musk so brazenly undermined last year?
They already trashed and starved America's foreign aid infrastructure — causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who depended on U.S. food and medicine for survival — so maybe now he is keen to inflict such bloody mayhem on poor and elderly Americans.
We know that Trump is determined to squander more of our treasure — much, much more - on forever wars and other military boondoggles. Every day, he lights a match to at least a billion dollars over Iran, and he has proposed to raise the budget of his "Department of War" to $1.5 trillion, the highest level ever. That doesn't include the expected supplemental funding request of $200 billion for Iran, an "excursion" that is supposed to end in two or three weeks.
Why the United States needs to increase defense spending so abruptly by 40% is unclear. Perhaps it is because the president, obsessed with stamping his name everywhere, wants a fleet of new "Trump-class battleships." Perhaps it is because his tech donors want big wads of taxpayer cash for artificial intelligence weaponry, with all the obvious dangers of uncontrollable killing. Or perhaps it is because his two older sons, grifters extraordinaire like Dad, have invested in weapons manufacturing.
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