This op-ed appeared in the June 4, 2017 edition of the Sunday Star-Ledger.
When Congress returns to D.C. this week, they’ll begin working on President Trump’s budget proposal. Many of New Jersey’s Republican Congressional representatives – as well as a variety of other experts – have hinted that we need not worry about the president’s plan, because it is merely a suggestion and not really what Congress will end up approving and appropriating.
“The President proposes, and Congress disposes,” Congressman Leonard Lance has said several times. His colleague, the powerful House Appropriations Chair Rodney Frelinghuysen, has reiterated that “Congress has the power of the purse.”
And Gov. Christie’s spokesman, explaining why the governor wouldn’t weigh in on Trump’s plan, said “the federal spending proposal is not a final budget.”
These statements are all technically true. And I surely hope that Congress – and New Jersey’s House Republicans in particular – take that “power of the purse” seriously, weigh the severity of the pain that Trump’s proposal would bring to the Garden State, and move in a decidedly different direction.
However, it’s worth noting that Trump’s spending proposal is really quite similar to the budgets House Speaker Paul Ryan has put forward in recent years – budgets that many in the New Jersey Congressional delegation have supported.
What do the Trump and Ryan budget proposals have in common?
- They slash food assistance and other help for struggling and low-income families.
- They repeal the Affordable Care Act and target Medicaid for additional, severe cuts, putting health care in jeopardy for tens of millions of Americans.
- They slash so-called “non-discretionary defense” spending, including higher education support for colleges and students, research and development, and critical environmental programs.
- They shift a huge chunk of federal spending to states, forcing states like New Jersey – which cannot meet its past, current or future obligations – to either make up for the lost federal dollars (a task that’s clearly impossible) or make draconian cuts that will harm many New Jerseyans.
- They use the money saved by these deep cuts to provide huge tax cuts for the most well-off Americans.
- And they mask the true costs of those tax cuts by using budgetary gimmicks.
The human suffering from these spending plans would be real, and felt more in New Jersey than in most other states. That’s because we have a lagging economic recovery that has left too many families still struggling to make ends meet, barely holding onto the social safety net to get by in this high-cost state.
About 1.8 million New Jerseyans – including 852,000 kids – currently receive health coverage through Medicaid. Trump’s spending plan – when combined with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act passed by the House – cuts federal Medicaid spending by trillions of dollars over a decade. The most recent House budget did the same.
Meanwhile, nearly 900,000 New Jerseyans receive food assistance – and an overwhelming majority of them are in working families who just aren’t being paid enough to regularly put enough food on the table. Trump’s spending plan cuts the program that provides this assistance – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) – by nearly $200 billion over a decade. The most recent House budget did the same.
And in terms of budget pressures on state lawmakers, the Trump plan and the Ryan proposals again lack significant differences. Two basic facts remain unchanged: Federal funding makes up 29 percent of New Jersey’s total spending, and the state already faces a budget crisis that has led to a record-setting 11 credit downgrades under Gov. Christie, chronic revenue shortfalls, and a long and growing list of unmet needs, obligations and investments.
The loss of any federal funding – particularly on the scale as proposed by President Trump and Speaker Ryan – would put New Jersey even deeper in the hole, and the state has no capacity to make up the difference on its own. (After all, unlike the federal government, states can’t print money or run deficits – which is why the feds have traditionally led the charge on safety net spending.)
The bottom line is that Trump’s budget, and the House budgets proposed by Speaker Ryan in recent years, would lead to dramatic increases in hardship and poverty, an enormous strain on New Jersey’s already-dire fiscal situation, a widening of the already-yawning gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us, and a weakening of key investments that are necessary to grow the economy and create a strong workforce for the state’s future.
