According to some commentators, President Trump's recently unveiled budget proposal is incontrovertible evidence that our nation's CEO is a heartless charlatan. One writer cites the proposal as an effort to balance the federal budget "on the backs of the poor, the sick and the marginalized," and reported that "the deepest cuts" will come at the expense of the most needy. Her conclusion? Trump's budget "doesn't have a heart."
Assessments like these are misleading both in their factual claims and in their moral conclusions.
First of all, while the mainstream media headlines drone on about the cruel and draconian budget characterized primarily by "deep cuts" to Medicaid, they neglect to inform Average Joe American that they are using the term "cut" according to its Washington-ese definition, and not according to the English language definition with which you and I are familiar.
The truth – in plain English – is that under President Trump's budget proposal, not only will federal spending for Medicaid not be reduced by a single penny, but it will actually continue to grow over the next 10 years. In his May 23 press briefing, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney explained:
"There are no Medicaid cuts in the terms of what ordinary human beings would refer to as a cut. We are not spending less money one year than we spent before. What we are doing is growing Medicaid more slowly over the 10-year budget window than the Congressional Budget Office says that we should or says that we will under current law."
TRENDING: St. Patrick's role on the 'external hard drive'
Mulvaney also explained the motivating philosophy for this slow-down in Medicaid growth, and it didn't feature a lack of compassion, but rather an extension of it to more Americans: "Compassion needs to be on both sides of that equation. Yes, you have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for the folks who are paying it."
He's right. Only an irresponsible and unresponsive government would continue blindly expanding the rolls of a social welfare program while the workers who pay for it are struggling under the tax burden it imposes.
But there's another factor we need to explore here: the toxic equation in which throwing taxpayer money at the poor always equals "compassion" toward them. No one denies that some of our fellow citizens genuinely need help through hard times, and financial assistance will often be a part of what is needed. However, even setting aside for a moment the question of whether the federal government should be the source of that funding, we must re-examine our assumption that facilitating a person's long-term reliance upon government subsidies is ultimately helpful to the person.
In Marvin Olasky's book, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," he sets out seven "rules" applied by the St. Louis Provident Association over a century ago to ensure that its efforts to demonstrate compassion to the poor would neither morph into an enablement mechanism nor become the subject of fraud:
- Give relief only after personal investigation of each case …
- Give necessary articles and only what is immediately necessary …
- Give what is least susceptible of abuse.
- Give only in small quantities in proportion to immediate need; and less than might be procured by labor, except in cases of sickness.
- Give assistance at the right moment; don't prolong it beyond the duration of the necessity which calls for it …
- Require of each beneficiary abstinence from intoxicating liquors …
- Discontinue relieving all who manifest a purpose to depend on alms rather than their own exertion for support.
You may be thinking, "That's fine for a private charitable organization, but how in the world can our massive federal bureaucracy implement those rules?" Its incapacity to do so is just one reason why the federal government is not well-suited to care for the poor. But until such time as we can effectively return this function primarily to the private sector where it belongs, we should at least insist that our government's social welfare policies adhere as closely to these common-sense guidelines as possible.
The Trump administration appears to be on the right track toward this, as evidenced by Director Mulvaney's proclamation: "We're no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs."
So with regard to its approach to social welfare, don't call President Trump's budget "heartless." Call it smart compassion.