‘We will take a look’: Trump to consider entitlement cuts toward end of 2020

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President Trump said he will begin considering cuts to entitlement spending “toward the end of the year,” putting a politically perilous issue in play for 2020 that he had kept off the table in 2016, when he pledged to leave the programs alone.

Trump told CNBC in an interview from the sidelines of the Davos Summit on Wednesday that an increasingly strong U.S. economy will create the perfect moment to consider cuts. “It will be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that.”

“That’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, because it is such a big percentage,” Trump said, alluding to the amount of spending that can be revoked from the programs.

“We also have assets that we’d never had. We never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through different means, over $10,000 a family.”

Spending cuts have technically been on the agenda since at least last year, when the White House budget proposal for fiscal year 2020 proposed trillions in cuts to reach the goal of a balanced budget by 2034. The administration’s forecast, which relies on strong economic projections, calls for a $2.7 trillion spending cut over the coming decade. Much of this would come through cuts to entitlement spending, estimated at $1.9 trillion. But none of the entitlement cuts were expected to be enacted in the near term.

Running for office in 2015, Trump campaigned against entitlement reform, leveraging his stance against the rest of the GOP field.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican,” Trump said in a 2015 interview, “and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is fending off reports that he would cut entitlements after the Sanders campaign shared a clip of him proposing “changes” to Social Security and Medicare that Biden called “doctored.” The outcry shows the resistance among Democrats to plans that would cut government spending — and such plans’ toxicity. Trump’s calculation is that a strong economy will insulate him from voters who would otherwise resist.

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