The White House unveiled its budget for 2018, “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” on Tuesday, and late-night hosts are taking aim at it not just for its cruelty by cutting social programs that pay for food stamps and children’s health insurance—but also because it’s just plain dumb.
On Late Night, Seth Meyers examined the budget in depth, noting that although it is essentially a wish list and subject to changes by Congress, “what someone wishes for tells you a lot about that person.” And cutting tens of billions from disability insurance and hundreds of billions from Medicaid is not what a compassionate person asks for while blowing out their birthday candles—and it breaks Trump’s clearly stated campaign promise to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “This budget is not only cruel, it’s delusional,” said Meyers. “It would eviscerate safety net programs that poor and working people rely on just to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”
The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert focused not on the budget’s cruelty but on its glaring trillion-dollar math error. The budget assumes that cutting taxes for the wealthy will create 3 percent economic growth to balance the budget and that that money will then pay for the tax cut—but the administration is also using the same imaginary $2 trillion to balance the budget. “There’s a simple explanation for how this happened: Donald Trump is an idiot,” said Colbert. “Or he’s lying!”
Former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers went as far as to call this “a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.” But Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is defending the math, so Colbert has a math problem for him, and it’s one you might be familiar with: “If a train leaves Washington, D.C., traveling at 40 mph …”
