Iced-T14 said:
Good! Now pull out of Iran and slash overall spending
Trump tried cutting discretionary spending even more. Presidents can't do it alone. Congress does have to cooperate. But total non-defense discretionary spending is down under Trump by roughly 10%. He proposed 20% cuts.
But until there is a President with a Congress and Senate in complete alignment with dramatically overhauling mandatory entitlement spending, you will never get a decrease in total spending. It's not possible.
We don't have a President that wants to tackle the third rail of American politics. We don't have enough members of Congress that want to tackle the third rail of American politics. That's not a Trump problem. That's not a Congress problem. That is an American Voter problem. Until you get enough of the electorate supporting the right candidates to tackle these issues, we are stuck with massive growth in the federal budget.
The only hope we have is that GEnX will have the courage to do what needs to be done when they stand alone as the oldest generation in America. It's not happening until then. There may be movement when GenX is the larger percentage of oldest Americans. We actually pass boomers in that regard in the next few years. But it will take another 10 years before GenX becomes the dominate senior voter in America.
I'm not holding my breath on this. I'm just saying it's our best chance at radical reforms. Unfortunately GenX is a really small generation compared to Boomers and Millennials. Their power as senior voters will be much shorter lived than the Boomers and Greatest Generation as a proportion of the electorate during peak voting power.
But right now we have no major momentum in national discourse on this issue. A very driven and media savvy leader will have to rise up with a message that resonates and generates energy to cut federal spending and reform entitlement spending. It appears this leader will have to do in a season where young progressive democrats are digging Marxism and communist-lite policies. The conservative and libertarian movements will also be working to clean up all the mixed-messages of MAGA. So it's going to take a master communicator that is a savant of federal spending and entitlements.
Our biggest problem took 100 years to create. It can't be solved inside a country that has federal election cycles every two years.
But Trumps team has actually done as much as they can do in the areas that are under their control when in comes to non-defense discretionary spending. More than any president in any of our lifetimes, even Reagan. But Reagan didn't have a GOP Congress. The horseshoe right and Trumps own undisciplined messaging has done a good job of muddying the very real successes of Trump in this regard unfortunately as we head into the mid-terms.
