Saturday, March 18, 2017

Here's How Donald Trump's Budget Screws Over the People Who Elected Him

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/donald-trumps-budget-sticks-it-people-who-elected-him
"The Upper Midwest: Trump broke the Democratic "blue wall" by racking up huge wins along the Great Lakes in places like Erie, Pennsylvania, and Macomb County, north of Detroit. His budget axes the $300 million in annual funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, an EPA program that aims to boost economic development and improve public health, with 3,455 projects across eight states. The Great Lakes initiative exists to combat the ill-effects of the region's industrial legacy. Among its chief responsibilities: stopping algae blooms that left 400,000 Ohioans without drinking water at one point in 2014. Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton already called an earlier version of the proposed cuts "alarming." The Upper Midwest is also known to get cold in the winter. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps 5.7 million Americans heat their homes, and those people are disproportionately located in the frigid Midwest. (Michigan, for example, receives more funding than California, which has a far greater population.) The energy assistance saves families money they often need for other things—41 percent of the recipients in 2014 lived with someone with a disability, and 19 percent had children. Rural America: Terry Gross will be fine—the cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that Mulvaney alluded to will mostly affect small public radio stations in rural America that get by on subsidies rather than tote bags. Mulvaney's hypothetical coal miner most likely lives in Wyoming, Trump's best state, where public radio will face a $320,000 budget hole if Trump gets his way, and Wyoming public television would need $700,000 to fill a 30 percent budget gap. Those are the lucky ones: In 2014, the CPB noted that 26 rural stations—many on Native American reservation—relied on federal funding for at least half of their revenue. In addition to providing news and cultural programming, these stations function as emergency broadcasting platforms in the event of a disaster."