Rep. Yarmuth Calls Trump’s $4.8 Trillion Budget 'Destructive'

President

Trump

released his annual

budget

yesterday the four point eight

trillion

dollar spending plan will impose some deep cuts to social programs while increasing defense and entitlement spending and that would push the gross federal debt above 30

trillion

dollars over the next decade US House

Budget

Committee Chairman John

Yarmuth

firing back at president

Trump

's proposal writing what the president has put forth as a

destructive

and irrational

budget

that intentionally goes after

working families and vulnerable Americans he has broken his promises to the American people Congressman John

Yarmuth

joins us now from Capitol Hill congressman great to talk to you thank you very much so if that's how you feel about the

budget

what's your solution well a question what's what's the problem right now we have two problems we do have a deficit problem it's getting worse we're now running a

trillion

dollar a year plus deficit which is a very significant

increase from since Donald

Trump

's been in office but we also have a deficit in the country we have an infrastructure deficit we have an education deficit we've got to start making investments in the American people if we're going to have a stable foundation for our future and right now when interest rates are still very low is the appropriate time to do that instead what this Republican

budget

proposes is to cut taxes additionally extending the tax cuts after 2025 that's an

additional 1.5

trillion

dollars worth of reduction in in income to the government and they they offset that with significant cuts to Medicare Medicaid Social Security the SNAP program a lot of our what we call our automatic stabilizers that are there to protect people in in case of a drop in the economy so this has exactly the wrong priorities but it's the same playbook that the Republicans have have used for the last couple decades whenever they can cut taxes and then cut social support

programs to pay for them well I mean we all know that the

budget

deficit is a problem but it's not like the Democrats are also tackling entitlements the way that needs to be done to get it under control so what can you recommend well actually one of the things we've been working on is some very significant initiatives to cut prescription drug prices that's one of the biggest driver of our health care costs and therefore of our Medicare and Medicaid expenditures we would love to get

cooperation out of Republicans in Congress and the administration to work on that with us we passed legislation already HR 3 which we think would go a long way we're working on on more but we need to have a bipartisan effort to get a handle on this I read the other day where the the Utah State Employees now are sent to Mexico on the state's dime they're paying for their plane tickets and giving them $500 to go buy their medications in Mexico that's absurd in this country and

there are some steps we know we can take to to make a difference in that area the other problems are though Alyx we've got a we've got an aging population 10,000 people a day are turning 65 that's not going to change so we have to we have to either bring new people in to help pay into those into Social Security and into Medicare or we have to take a really hard look at what's driving the increase in those medical expenses so there seems to be the relatively little chance of any

of this passing right so how do you then move forward if you're gonna try and continue to grow the economy the Republicans are looking at say 3% that seems to be very difficult to get to what can you do though to get to like maybe two or two-and-a-half if you want to continue to say cut taxes or something or not raise taxes we have had a number of economists before the

budget

committee who have talked about this very thing and one of the one of the biggest problems we have right now is we

don't have enough people in the country we need comprehensive immigration reform to bring people into the country to grow the economy grow the tax base and and to filled many of the jobs that are out there looking for people there's really no answer to that unless everybody's going to become a lot more fertile very quickly but we can do it with comprehensive immigration reform and we must that's really the only immediate thing I think we can do to stimulate growth in the economy

we can invest in sure that'll that'll make a difference and we've got a proposal that we was introduced last week to do that on a fairly significant basis but other than that it's not cutting taxes for the very wealthy CBO came to the committee last week with our annual report said tax cuts on only 20% of the cost of tax cuts is recovered through the economy so 80% of tax cuts are reduced reduced GDP and last year was 1% so again we can't keep doing the same thing over and

over which Republicans want to do thinking that a trickle-down strategy works it never has and it won't so there is obviously a New Hampshire primary taking place today as well which a candidate would be the most apt to get done what you say you want to get done that's a great question I haven't endorsed in the race and I think the key factor will be not necessarily who the the next person sitting in the White House is its what kind of Congress he or she has and I think that's

really what we have to focus on who can who can not only win the White House but also can can carry people into the Senate as well and preserve our majority in the house because otherwise whether it's Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or any of the others they're not going to be able to get an agenda through