By Steve Levy
As I was preparing for News 12’s “Power & Politics” segment regarding President Trump‘s joint address before Congress, I came upon a number of interesting statistics I thought I’d share them with you.
On Tariffs:
Forty percent of cars purchased in America are Japanese cars. Yet only 1% of American cars are purchased in Japan.
China’s tariffs on our goods are two-and-a-half times the tariffs we place on theirs. South Korea’s is four times as great.
On The Department of Education:
The Defense Department obviously manages the nation’s defense. The Department of Transportation oversees and manages the expenditures for federal roads. But the Department of Education does not manage or control our education system. That is done by the states and paid for through the state and local governments.
The Department of Education did not exist in America until the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter created it as payback to the teachers union for its support of his 1976 election campaign.
Only about 8 to 10% of all education funding stems from the federal government. The department spends approximately $250 billion a year. It has 4,500 employees. Since its inception, American test scores have gone down, down, down. Trump wants to redirect that money for a block grant to the states and for school choice while eliminating the bureaucracy.
On Medicaid:
No, it’s not true that Republicans are trying to gut Medicaid. But the fact is, Medicaid is growing at an alarmingly accelerating rate. It started under Obama‘s term when he continued to raise the eligibility for Medicaid as part of his vast Obamacare campaign. They also removed work requirements.
This safety net measure, which was designed for the poor, is now an uncontrollable behemoth. One in five Americans are on Medicaid nationwide. Alarmingly, one in three New Yorkers is on Medicaid.
The Republicans are not trying to gut Medicaid for the poor, but rather to ensure that able-bodied people are not sitting on their duffs playing video games and collecting Medicaid without making any attempts to find work.
They’re trying to reimpose the workfare that President Clinton put in place very successfully, but was unwound during the Obama and Biden years.
Medicaid expanded exponentially by two-thirds from 2019 to the present day. The bloat must be brought under control.
On Wasteful Spending:
Some of the crazy spending exposed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) includes millions to a study on sex change operations for mice; funds for learning in Asian countries (even though Asians are far outperforming American students), millions for diversity scholarships in Burma and uncovering that the filing of federal retirements are still being done by hand with the paperwork stored in an underground tunnel.
On Huge Budget Growth:
Is it any wonder that the federal budget increased an alarming two-thirds since 2019 from $4.5 trillion to nearly $7 trillion?
There were huge increases in spending during World War II, but those expenditures were brought back down to reality when the war ended. With Covid, spending increased by 65% and stayed at that level into perpetuity as the new normal.
On Tax Cuts:
The person on the show with me repeated the same old, worn-out false talking point that the tax cuts of 2017 were tax breaks for billionaires that increased the deficit. This was not a tax cut for billionaires, but rather an across-the-board tax cut, just like President Kennedy implemented in the 1960s. The tax cuts in the Sixties, the Eighties and in 2017 led to boom economies, which actually brought in more revenues than before they were implemented. Deficits increased since the Eighties, but that was totally the result of excessive spending, not the tax cuts which actually brought in more revenue.
The 2017 tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year. While they were incorrectly termed a tax cut for the rich, they were across-the-board cuts. Most important for the middle class was a doubling of the standard deduction from $12,500 to $25,000. That amounted to an additional $2,000 in tax savings for the average family. Ninety percent of the population checks off the standard deduction box. https://www.creators.com/read/stephen-moore/05/24/5-reasons-to-make-the-trump-tax-cut-permanent