May 25, 2017 3 min read

“Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation? If (the poor) would rather die, they had better do it, and reduce the surplus population.” – Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”

We apply the name Scrooge to people who have no empathy, no sympathy for their fellow man. The image of the old miser certainly came to mind Tuesday when President Trump rolled out his budget proposal for 2018.

The $4.1 trillion spending plan, which relies on projections, hopes and pipe dreams that have no tether to reality, finds plenty of money for border security, including $1.6 billion to start construction of the president’s proposed wall along the Mexican border, and of course includes tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the already wealthy.

But truly the worst part of this budget is its heartless attacks on those who can afford them least. The plan would slash more than $800 billion from Medicaid – beyond the cuts proposed in the health-care overhaul passed recently in the House – and another $192 billion from nutritional assistance programs. It also would cut more than $72 billion from disability benefits. Sorry, Tiny Tim.

Medicaid, which dates to 1965 and was expanded through the Affordable Care Act, is a program that provides health-care coverage to low-income Americans, many of them children and the elderly, as well as people with disabilities.

In 2015, Trump took to Twitter to claim, “I was the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” So much for that promise.

The president trumpeted his budget as “A New Foundation for American Greatness.” Finding support for that assessment outside the White House isn’t easy.

The consensus is that this spending framework has no chance of passage in Congress. The president, himself, was overseas and not present for its unveiling.

“The budget is dead before arrival, so he might as well be out of town,” David A. Stockman, a budget director under President Reagan, told The New York Times. “There’s not a snowball’s chance that most of this deep deficit reduction will even be considered in a serious way.”

Republican Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, told the Washington Post that the Medicaid cuts are a no-go from the get-go.

“I’ve got one of the poorest districts in the country, with lots of Medicaid recipients as well as other programs,” he said. “The cuts are draconian.”

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Robert Greenstein, in an interview with the Business Insider website, called the president’s plan “the most radical, Robin-Hood-in-reverse budget that any modern president has ever proposed.”

Presumably with a straight face, the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters, “We’re not going to measure our success by how much money we spend, but by how many people we actually help.”

What’s most depressing is that there are no doubt millions of people across this country who see no problem with what the administration is attempting to do with this plan, and in fact would cheerfully support it. It mirrors the apparent glee of House Republicans when they passed a bill that would cause millions of Americans to lose their health coverage.

When did so many Americans, and many of our elected officials, start taking such joy in hurting those who already are hurting. To borrow a word used by the president in so many late-night tweets, it’s just sad.