Pulling a Putin

Donald Trump finally released his budget, and of course it massively increases the federal debt. When Barack Obama wanted to jump-start the economy with infrastructure spending in the aftermath of Bush's economic meltdown, Republicans refused, claiming that the federal debt was absolutely horrible.

Now, with the King of Debt as president, Republicans are now completely in favor of having the federal government go on a huge borrowing spree to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and a massive increase in military spending.

Trump ran for president on promises of extracting us from foreign wars. But he has increased troop levels in Afghanistan, and sent troops to Syria and back to Iraq. American troops have died in Africa on secret missions. Trump is on course to start wars with North Korea and Iran. He's starting programs to build new, smaller, nuclear weapons to respond to "extreme circumstances" and non-nuclear attacks. This is the same idiot who wondered during the campaign why we couldn't use nuclear weapons.

But the biggest lie in Trump's budget is the "infrastructure plan." The plan claims to spend $200 billion over 10 years. Notice how they always do these things over 10 years to make it sound like a lot of money? The budget is redone every year, so these 10-year budget proposals are a total joke -- it'll all be thrown out next year.

But Trump's budget actually includes $168 billion in infrastructure cuts to programs that Trump doesn't care about, such as mass transit. So Trump is really only proposing to spend an additional $3 billion a year on infrastructure, which is only a hundred miles of interstate or a couple of big bridges.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated last year that $4.6 trillion is needed for our roads, bridges, ports, drinking water supplies, dams, airports and mass transit. Trump's plan does absolutely nothing to address those needs.

What it does do is to privatize billions of dollars of federal assets, including airports, roads, and federal land. Trump is doing what Vladimir Putin did: give away government assets to his pals so they can get rich.

Trump wants to turn every interstate in the country into a toll road so his buddies can soak you every time you drive to work. Trump wants give his campaign contributors a private monopoly on airports so they get a cut every time you fly. Trump wants to sell federal lands --including parklands -- to Canadian and Chilean mining companies that will leave the land a toxic mess for centuries.

This is the very definition of crony capitalism and corruption.