Trump’s Cruel and Costly Budget Bill Just Got Even Worse

But the Senate is supposed to know better. George Washington reputedly said that the Senate, being less responsive to popular passions than the House, was like the saucer into which one pours coffee to cool it before drinking (that’s apparently something people used to do). But not a lot of cooling takes place in the Senate budget bill. 

Cuts to the food stamp program are a little smaller in the Senate bill than in the House version, Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer, now at the Center for American Progress, told me. I phoned Kogan because the Congressional Budget Office and various nonprofits hadn’t yet had time to score the proposal. Where the House cuts nearly $300 billion, Kogan said, the Senate cuts more than $200 billion. But either way, Kogan explained, this would be the largest cut in the program’s history. 

The Senate’s cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, however, are bigger than in the House bill—probably in excess of $900 billion, according to Kogan. The House bill cuts these programs by somewhere north of $800 billion, at a cost, according to the Yale School of Public Health, of 51,000 lives. As David Dayen explains bluntly in The American Prospect, “more people will die as a result of the Senate’s actions.”  

These cuts aren’t just pathologically cruel, though they’re certainly that. They’re also politically moronic. As I explained last month, Medicaid has evolved from a small program with a politically powerless constituency into a large program covering much of the working class, thereby merging into the third rail of American politics already occupied by Social Security and Medicare.