Today’s quotation is not, as may have seemed obvious from the header, taken from Charles Dickens or from any of my other usual sources of inspiration. It is, rather, an utterance by a modern-day Scrooge so horrific, so blatantly cruel, so beneath contempt (even for him) that I could not allow it to pass unnoticed or unremarked.

In proposing a national budget for 2027 that would include defense spending of $1.5 trillion — an increase of some 44 per cent over 2026 — Donald Trump further proposed to reduce spending on non-defense programs by 10 per cent. According to Budget Director Russell Vought, “President Trump promised to reinvest in America’s national security infrastructure, to make sure our nation is safe in a dangerous world.” [Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking, Associated Press, April 3, 2026.]

Well, whoopee!

But it was what Trump himself said at a private White House event that made me want to put my fist through a wall:

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.” [Id.]

Right. Forget about the fact that the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (the Medicaid and Medicare Act) have been the law of the land for the past 60 years. And forget about the fact that Medicare is funded by payroll taxes that we citizens pay throughout our working lives to help secure our own futures. Or that we continue paying premiums for the limited coverage it provides even after we’re retired. (For those too young to have thought about it, those premiums are deducted from our Social Security checks; they are not optional.)

Of course, the lives of the most vulnerable — the children, the elderly, the sick and disabled — mean nothing. Never mind “all these individual things.”

Forget about all of that; just dump the responsibility onto the individual states, which would have to raise taxes on those same citizens if they were to have even a hope of being able to shoulder the responsibility.

None of that matters, as long as Scrooge has enough money to fight those wars . . . the wars that he himself started.

HOLY . . .

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/4/26