Trump Says His Budget Makes Safety ‘No. 1 Priority’ But it Will Kill Americans

Byron Callan writes at Aviation Week that, “The consensus among sell-side analysts is that the U.S. defense budget has entered a new up-cycle.”

This increase in defense spending comes, of course, at the expense of a whole host of federal programs, programs that not only keep people safe but sustain the lives of vulnerable young and elderly Americans.

Donald Trump tweeted a pathetic and wholly dishonest defense of his budget, claiming that “A budget that puts #AmericaFirst must make safety its no. 1 priority—without safety there can be no prosperity,” but the truth is something else entirely:

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Take a look at some of the cuts as demonstrated by this chart from Bloomberg:

If you look at the list of Trump budget losers, it is difficult to make the argument that his budget is protecting us, or that safety is his first concern.

The EPA protects our air and water. Poisoned water and air will kill people. Trump cut its budget.

NOAA weather satellites protect all of us. Increasingly erratic weather as a result of the anthropogenic global warming the Trump administration denies will kill more people. Trump cut its budget.

And the list goes on, affecting Americans in all sorts of ways, most of them fatally, as these examples show.

Trump says safety is no. 1, but he’s taking healthcare away from 24 million Americans, many of whom will die as a result. All Trump’s broken promises to give healthcare to everyone didn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from saying Trump’s budget is a “another promise kept” (good luck finding the first).

Trump says safety is no. 1, but he is cutting funding to the NIH, which studies diseases others do not study, in efforts to keep people like my own son alive:

Trump says we have to be safe, but he’s not making Americans safe, but killing them:

Trump says safety is no. 1, but he’s not making vulnerable seniors safe, but killing them:

If you want to know what this means, Obama’s White House ethics czar Norm Eisen does the math:

“By Sun, Trump will have spent $12 mil of taxpayer $ on Mar A Lago. That’s 2 mil of the Meals on Wheels ($6 each) his budget eliminates. [S]o for every day that he spends at Mar A Lago, 166,000 seniors will go hungry. Why doesn’t he cut his trips, &leave meals on wheels alone.”

Trump says safety is no. 1, but he’s not making citizens of New York City safer, he’s putting them at risk, with NYPD Commissioner James P. O’Neill saying at a press conference,

“Under the president’s proposal, nearly all federal funding to the NYPD would be eradicated. This funding is absolutely critical. It is the backbone of our entire counter-terrorism apparatus.”

Trump says safety is no. 1, but he is also making us less safe in the future by driving away some of the world’s best and brightest young people, people who will possibly now not have the opportunity to realize their potential:

When U.S. defense spending already dwarfs that of Russia and China combined, we see that President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex has come to its full fruition under Donald Trump and the most senseless increase in defense spending ever seen.

Donald Trump’s budget isn’t about making safety his no. 1 priority. Even the Pentagon says global warming is a national security threat yet Trump and his administration reject global warming.

More tanks and airplanes won’t stop the seas from rising to flood coastal areas or keep rising temperatures from damaging the world’s food supply. The war in Syria was brought about in part by global warming, not because there were not enough tanks or airplanes.

Trump’s budget is about diverting our tax dollars away from Americans and toward the military industrial complex, directing dollars away from the people who need it most, vulnerable children and the elderly, and using it to fill the swamp he promised to drain.

Photo: Fox News/Twitter

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.