Savings that aren t even built themselves on realistic expectations. how obvious was that to you when you first looked at this? it s actually worse than $2 trillion. i was actually on the call when mulvaney briefed the press as i guess a member of the press in my spare time. and, in fact, what they did was they did not count any costs from the president s $5 trillion to $6 trillion tax cut plan. so, in fact, there s 5.5 trill dollars call it, of lost revenue that is nowhere in this budget. in fact, what this budget comes down to very simply is $3.6 trillion of proposed spending cuts, most of which will never get through the democrats in the senate who have a block on a lot of this stuff, and $5.5 trillion of tax cuts that as bernie sanders said heavily go to the rich. in fact, this budget they claim will be balanced in fact creates
But it also strikes me someone like mick mulvaney, who wrote this budget by all appearances, genuinely believes in what he s doing. i mean the republicans who are proposing this, it is not politically popular, and it just seems to me they have affirmatively chosen this because they genuinely believe in the project they are engaged in. well, i wouldn t go so the answer is yes and no. they believe in it, but it doesn t hurt that the koch brothers, over many, many years, have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars propping up and creating think tanks and all kinds of so-called nonprofits and putting unbelievable amounts of money into political campaigns. so what their view is, my perception is, they understand they re cutting medicaid, cutting pell grants, cutting nutrition programs, very politically unpopular. but on the other hand, they have unlimited sums of money from the billionaire class behind them to go after democrats go after
Numbers, have gotten to learn about the ahca, the republican alternative, have learned how this would all work, it is actually working, i think, very substantially to the republicans disadvantage. i think you re going to see a lot of republicans running away from this bill and running away from these kinds of changes. jennifer, the significance to me of this being a question about the cbo score that prompts this response, i mean, you know, he does not want to answer a question about the cbo score under the ahca. i think that s clear from the audio. right. i want to make one point about the cbo score that i hope doesn t get lost because of the news coming out of montana and the general uproar over the budget, which is entirely justified. paul ryan, the president of the united states went to congress, went to the american people and said, oh, this amendment, the meadows macarthur amendment, we ve taken care of people with pre-existing illnesses. that is precisely what the cbo points
The republicans, you know. i think what it s about is that they re going to have to go back to the drawing board. i don t know how, if you re a republican congressman, you go home to montana or anybody else, anyplace else and say, look, the cbo has just said we re throwing 23 million people off of health insurance. you re an older worker, 63, 64 years old, your premiums are soaring. you re a woman. you have gone to planned parenthood for years. we re not going to allow you to do that anymore. so i think that this is a disaster for the republicans, and i think quist is quite right in campaigning on this. so there s also the budget, right? and the budget is that s right. the budget is interesting because it shares a lot in common with the acha, and all of it is very paul ryanism. it s what you would expect. no, no, no. chris, let me beg to differ with you. this is not paul ryan. this is the koch brothers. this is the ending in their view of 70, 75 years of programs designed to
Your elbow is okay. i i it s not my pitching arm, so i should be okay. okay. ben jacobs of the guardian, who you just heard his account, he says, of being assaulted by the man who is running to represent montana in the united states congress the day before he will be on the ballot in the special election there. greg gianforte, who did this in response to a question from ben, according to ben and to the audio that we just heard, about the cbo score on the ahca. ben jacobs, i hope you get a clean bill of health. thanks for making time tonight. i appreciate it. thanks. i m joined now by jennifer rubin and stephen ratner. we were going to talk about the budget, but i feel like, jennifer, have you ever heard of such a thing in your time in politics? this is absolutely stunning. first of all, that he would be threatened apparently by a meek