Good Friday apparently was a good Friday for the Trump administration it to ask for a $500 billion increase in the annual military budget, about a 50% increase in the already swollen annual expenditures.
As The New York Times reported, Trump also, "indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid.
"It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things," he said.
"They can do it on a state basis."
There are two problems with Mr. Trump's thinking here.
First, the federal and state governments are taxing exactly the same people, so shifting the financing of existing federal programs to state governments would not increase the amount of money that could be brought in.
But did Trump propose reducing federal taxes currently financing these programs to allow the states to raise their taxes enough to pay for those programs?
Whether he proposed such federal tax reductions or not, I suspect he really wants to keep the existing taxes, perhaps with some more reductions of taxes paid by billionaires, but discontinue paying for existing
federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
I don't want to get too technical, but the payroll taxes financing Medicare are required, by federal law, to be spent on Medicare.
President Trump might be well advised to repudiate this idea, if only for political reasons.
The states which Republicans carried in 2024 are less industrialized and have less taxable property and incomes than the states carried by Democrats.
These states would therefore find it difficult or impossible to increase their tax rates enough to pay for Medicare and Medicaid.
Someone in the White House may have warned him about this, since the video of his remarks was hastily removed from the White House website. However copies of this video had already been made elsewhere, so this particular cat is already out of the bag.
Democratic candidates will surely exploit this episode in their 2026 campaigns.
The second problem with Trump's thinking here is that it sounds as if he does not understand economies of scale. For a major example, consider Medicare.
Rather than setting up separate agencies in the 50 states to administer Medicare, the single federal agency now doing this job can cost a lot less as well as assuring uniformity in Medicare coverage for people in every state.
Administrative costs will therefore be much higher if performed separately by the 50 states.
The existing Medicare program also avoids the need for people to change their coverage every time they move from one state to another, which often happens.
Economies of scale are a vital part of modern economies. The price of solar panels, for example, has fallen dramatically as the number of them being produced annually has zoomed. The more something is produced, the better the producers are at finding shortcuts and efficiencies, and these can really add up over time.
It is a bit much that Mr. Trump wants to divert all this money currently supporting Americans to a Pentagon which has yet to pass a standard audit of its finances and which is already spending nearly a trillion dollars a year.
Much of this money is intended to purchase large scale weapons, including expensive aircraft and a "Trump class" of battleships, which are likely to be vulnerable to cheap weapons like drones.
We would do better to cut the Pentagon budget in half, concentrate on inexpensive weapons, and refrain from getting into unnecessary wars.
As Otto von Bismarck, German leader in the late 1800s once noted, "Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."
If we do not learn from our own experience with Iranian drones, we are worse than fools.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read more Prof. Paul F. deLespinasse Insider articles — Click Here Now.