First, trust the budget wonks more than the politicians.
Well, that's kind of the entire point. Trump exists because people don't trust the wonks.
They don't trust the wonks because Trump is the latest of a long line of people insisting that the wonks are bad people. It took decades to make that trend and it won't reverse any time soon. Even if they've learned not to trust Trump (and they haven't), they won't go back to experts.
Fixing the budget requires grappling with hard choices. Reversing the tax cuts is nowhere near sufficient.
Trump was swept in on a wave of belief that the budget was full of "woke" wasteful spending, and even with free rein to cut everything they wanted, those cuts are a rounding error. (And that's by their own calculations, which are probably exaggerated by an order of magnitude.)
And anybody who even glanced at the budget knew that. The big spending items are all things that people feel strongly about: social security, Medicare, defense. Without touching those sacred cows, you won't fix it.
Will this realization prevent us from increasing defense spending 50% in one go next year? I'm not holding my breath.
I think a number of people who voted for trump don't trust wonks because for a LONG time (many of) the wonks kept insisting that when we off-shored low paying jobs, high-paying jobs would come back to the united states.
I'm not saying we should try to get every low margin job back in the states, but maybe we should plan out a REASONED tariff policy that protects SOME low margin jobs. Investing in education might not be a bad idea either.
That wasn't really the wonks. That was the message from Big Business.
A reasoned tariff policy is a pretty good idea, but a scattershot one is much, much worse.
Unfortunately, that reasoned tariff policy is not easy to write. The good low-paying jobs are part of a system. You need to bring back whole industries. You can't build just one factory; you need many. It requires the government to subsidize and coordinate the industries as they get going, not just throw a tariff at it.
They may not trust the wonks, but if they can't recognize that what they did vote for was a spectacularly idiotic idea, then we've got much deeper problems.
