Opinion: Hey, Trump administration, many Americans want to pay taxes to support social programs

To the editor: It’s the same old conservative line: Cut services to the poor and disabled, and increase spending on defense. After all, as Marie Antoinette is believed to have said, let them eat beautiful chocolate cake. (“Trump budget underscores new national priorities: slashing the safety net and taxes,” May 23)

We get these kinds of proposals without many details. It is assumed that the poor will survive since there are so many of them, so why waste our tax dollars on Medicaid and children’s health programs? Our bucks will get more bang by investing in defense. Yet, what exactly is the bang?

But as we’ve seen all too often, you don’t need a large military today to take on an enemy. Lone suicide bombers like the one in Manchester, England, can grip a nation in fear. It doesn’t take hundreds of billions of dollars to take these “losers” on.

So why not concentrate on the poor, the sick and the defenseless? All those products of war won’t make us stronger, but compassion and common sense just might.

Don A. Norman, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director, says: “I can’t look taxpayers in the eye anymore and say, ‘You have to keep paying for this.’ We can’t afford it and we cannot justify to the people who are paying the taxes.”

Great! He finally gets that we can’t stomach the thought of watching millions of dollars of our money going to pay for security for the self-enriching jaunts of Trump’s grown children, let alone the president’s weekends spent golfing on his own courses.

But no. Mulvaney was referring to slashing the budget for social programs for the poorest and most vulnerable — Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and the like. I wish he would look me in the eye so I could tell him how much I want to pay taxes for these programs.

Rachel Pagones, Encinitas

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To the editor: This article misstates Medicaid history when it reports, “Historically it was limited to poor children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with disabilities.”

On the contrary, the Medicaid program was limited to those population groups in the 1980s. It supported far more low-income Americans when it launched in 1965. I know this from personal experience, since it paid for my lifesaving cancer surgery at UCLA in 1980, when I was a low-income graduate student with preexisting health conditions that led to the cancer.

The history of these programs is important to know, including their original intent and not only what we have today.

Sally Richman, Los Angeles

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