Jibran Khan writes for National Review Online about the next round of reform that could follow a federal tax bill. Khan is underwhelmed.
In the 2008 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans both spoke about the need to control entitlement spending; indeed, even Obamacare was meant “to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health-care costs.” This had become a much less popular stance by the 2016 election, with both Clinton and Trump insisting that it was neither necessary nor desirable to tackle entitlements.
Now, with the GOP’s tax bill expected to reduce revenue by $1 trillion or so, the need to control spending is even more urgent. But the stance Trump took during the campaign has not changed. In “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” the Trump administration’s outline of its spending and budget priorities for 2018, “No Cuts to Social Security” and “No Cuts to Medicare” are explicitly stated.
What, then, are the entitlements that the Trump administration wants to reform? The proposal advocates $274 billion in welfare cuts, largely to the food-stamp program (SNAP), with smaller amounts from the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit (achieved by limiting participation to those authorized to work in the U.S.). Reform is certainly necessary across the board, but in the case of SNAP, for instance, it is more an issue of implementation than of the letter of the law. And these programs are dwarfed in costs by those of the explicitly untouched Social Security and Medicare (which Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, claims to have secured against cuts in a deal with leadership).
