What did Donald Trump do today?
He shared some thoughts on his own budget proposal.
Trump is taking his usual long weekend at one of his private luxury golf resorts, after a hard week of complaining that Americans take too many vacation days. But he found time to post some thoughts about the budget to his private microblogging site:
I HATE “GREEN TAX CREDITS” IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. They are largely a giant SCAM. I would much prefer that this money be used somewhere else, including reductions. “Anywhere” would be preferable! Windmills, and the rest of this “JUNK,” are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy. None of it works without massive government subsidy (energy should NOT NEED SUBSIDY!). Also, it is almost exclusively made in China!!! It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!
As is usually the case in such rants, a lot of this is just false. All sectors of the energy industry are subsidized, from ethanol made from subsidized corn, to oil and gas leases sold for pennies on the dollar, to straight cash infusions for nuclear plants. And Trump's bizarre fixation on "windmills," which he genuinely believes cause cancer, is well known. But it's unusual for a sitting president to call his own budget bill a "SCAM."
Of course, Trump is entitled to his opinions about whether the roughly $12 billion set aside for such credits would be better spent elsewhere. To put that number in perspective, lets say that this symbol represented the cost of those credits
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which are for property upgrades making Americans' homes more energy-efficient, wage boosts for workers apprenticing in construction and green energy jobs, and building new electrical grid capacity for cheap renewable source. These sorts of things tend to be extremely popular with Americans, even if some of the people they benefit—like Trump's political patron, Tesla CEO Elon Musk—are not.
The $4.5 trillion in the tax cuts Trump does like in his own bill, which are mostly straight cash returns to the very wealthiest Americans would look like this:
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Why does this matter?
- Trump could have done something about this months ago if he'd been paying attention to who was using his authority and to what end.
- The problem most Americans have with this budget isn't that it doesn't reflect Trump's priorities, but that it does.