A fiscal hawk to OMB
The Washington Post reports:
President-elect Donald Trump has named Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) as his director of the Office of Management and Budget, signaling his intent to slash spending and address the deficit as president.
Mulvaney, 49, was elected to Congress in 2010 in the wave that brought a cohort of younger, staunchly conservative members into the House. Mulvaney quickly staked out ground as one of Congress’s most outspoken fiscal hawks — playing a key role in the 2011 showdown between President Obama and House Republicans that ended in the passage of strict budget caps.
He has been an advocate for spending cuts, often taking on his own party to push for more aggressive curbs to government spending.
Trump’s policies were to massively increase spending but he has appointed as head of OMB someone who wants to greatly curb spending.
The federal deficits blew out under both GWB and Obama and is unsustainably high. Eventually they need to get back into surplus where tax revenue matches or exceeds spending. Mulvaney may be the person who can help do that.
Mulvaney is also an advocate of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.
Trump could push for that along with term limits.
Among Mulvaney’s chief duties will be overseeing the most dramatic overhaul of the nation’s tax code since President Ronald Reagan. Trump has pledged to streamline the process for individual households and slash the rate for corporations from 35 percent to 15 percent. The changes are a central component of the administration’s promise to boost economic growth to 4 percent or higher, a message that resonated with voters still bruised by the Great Recession but that many economists say is unsustainable.
In addition, Trump has said that stronger growth would mean his tax proposal would not contribute to the national debt, and he has vowed not to cut expensive but popular entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But experts have been skeptical of those claims, and Mulvaney would be responsible for reconciling the numbers.
Trump’s numbers are nonsense. if Mulvaney can find a way through Trump’s rhetoric to actually eliminate the deficit, that would be a great thing.