Remember this when supporting the Trumpian sychophant Nigel Farage and his pals.
NOT MY PROBLEM! Trump’s Easter message to America — Federal government can’t be responsible for childcare, Medicare, or Medicaid, only “military protection.”
At an Easter luncheon at the White House today, Donald Trump looked out at a room full of families and told them, without a hint of shame, that daycare is simply not the federal government’s problem. “We can’t take care of daycare,” Trump said. “You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They have to raise their taxes.”
So, there you have it: Trump’s Easter gift to working American families is to tell them, essentially, “don’t talk to me, go talk to your governor and ask them to raise your state taxes if you want any social services.
It wasn’t just daycare that Trump wants to abdicate federal responsibility for. In the same breath, Trump extended this logic to Medicaid and Medicare — the programs that tens of millions of elderly, disabled, and low-income Americans depend on to survive. “Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said. “You can’t do it on a federal.”
The federal government, Trump explained, has exactly one job: “Military protection.”
Just one thing. That’s it. That’s the whole vision.
Never mind that the United States federal government has successfully administered Medicare since 1965, providing healthcare to over 65 million Americans. Never mind that Medicaid covers 80 million people — including children, pregnant women, nursing home residents, and people with disabilities — and that most states could not possibly fund it alone. Never mind that the entire reason these programs exist at the federal level is precisely because states couldn’t handle them on their own.
And never mind that this is coming from the same president who just signed a $400 million White House ballroom, who has spent hundreds of millions in taxpayer money on personal golf trips, and whose administration just handed billionaires the largest tax cut in American history.
We can’t afford daycare. But we can afford all of that?
Let’s also be clear about what “let the states raise their taxes” actually means in practice. It means the poorest states — which tend to be the reddest states, the states that voted for Trump — will be least able to fund these programs. It means a child in Mississippi gets worse care than a child in Massachusetts. It means the social safety net gets shredded one block grant at a time.
This isn’t small government philosophy. This is abandonment dressed up as federalism.
Please share this if you think the federal government’s job is to take care of the American people — not just to build bombs and ballrooms.
