Trump's budget previews his 2020 economic pitch: Tax cuts and more wall money

President Trump’s budget previews the economic pitch he will be making to voters: more deficit spending to compensate for extended tax cuts and pay for everything from his border wall to boosted NASA funding. All while avoiding painful cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The document, out today, abandons Trump’s 2016 campaign pledge to eliminate the national debt by the end of a second term — as well as the less-ambitious plan in his first budget to close the gap between federal revenue and spending by 2028.

The blueprint instead proposes to zero out the deficit by 2035, a goal whose math deficit hawks already are questioning. “I have no idea how he can live up to his campaign promises to reduce the deficit, not address entitlement programs, and at the same time cut taxes,” Bill Hoagland, a former top Republican budget staffer, tells my colleagues Jeff Stein and Erica Werner.

The Trump administration justifies its projections in part by relying on estimates of economic growth that are significantly sunnier than consensus forecasts —and lower interest rates on its borrowing. Mostly, though, the budget reflects the administration’s political judgment that neither GOP lawmakers nor voters will punish the president for pushing federal coffers further into the red.

Indeed, the plan closes a door Trump appeared to crack open last month to considering cuts to Medicare benefits, a third rail for elderly voters who rely on the government health-care program. “We’re going to look,” he said of that possibility in an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Trump’s budget is expected to seek significant savings from Medicare but by targeting “what officials believe is waste in the program,” per the New York Times’s Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Margot Sanger-Katz. “Many of the suggested tweaks are identical to proposals from the Obama administration’s budgets for the program. Taken together, the changes would represent around half a trillion dollars in reduced Medicare spending but do not include any major reductions to benefits or eligibility, like those proposed in House budgets when Republicans controlled that chamber.”