9:56 p.m., the first mention of tariffs.
Trump will not balance the budget. You could eliminate the entire military and still have a $1 trillion deficit at current levels. A bold, difficult, yet achievable goal would be to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio.
Trump promises to import rich immigrants who will balance the budget by paying lots of taxes. Which is not what will happen, although that alone isn’t a reason to oppose it. It is, however, a departure from the notion that immigrants should be suspect on grounds of competing with Americans.
@rponnuru — The acting Social Security commissioner, Lee Dudek, appointed by Trump himself, pushed back against the claims of millions of centenarians claiming Social Security benefits, noting: “I also want to acknowledge recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security. The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
SPOILER ALERT: Trump will not balance the federal budget.
Trump is repeating false information about alleged Social Security recipients who are beyond any human’s lifespan. This is largely the result of the coding language the SSA’s computers use. Totally support updating that coding! But it’s not going to save much money because those “people” are by and large not receiving benefits. If he’s concerned about dead people getting government benefits, he should ask his secretary of labor nominee, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, why she supports the Butch Lewis Act. That was Joe Biden’s union-pension bailout, and it sent $127 million to dead Teamsters members, according to the DOL inspector general.
Trump pledges to balance the federal budget, which would be almost delusional without his existing political commitments. With them, it is spectacularly delusional.
It cannot but warm my heart to hear any president lambaste wasteful spending from the rostrum of the House. I dream of an America in which such money doesn’t get spent if the Congress doesn’t actually vote for it.
Now Trump is repeating claims, debunked weeks ago, about Social Security payments going to implausibly old people. See for example here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/20/trumps-social-security-head-contradicts-claims-dead-recipients/79330447007/
Trump is going through a list of nutty-sounding things the federal government has been spending money on. I don’t think the Democrats realize that they are doing nothing to dispel the impression that they’re for each and every one of those boondoggles.