Conservatives compare Trump's budget to that of Reagan

Washington Examiner:
Leading fiscal conservatives are showering President Trump's first federal budget proposal with some of their highest praise: comparisons to Ronald Reagan.

"This is the most fiscally conservative budget since Reagan," Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute and editor of Downsizing Government, told the Washington Examiner.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, called it a "very strong budget" and said it's what the 40th president himself would have submitted if he had both a Republican House and Senate. Democrats controlled the House for all eight years of the Reagan administration, one of the reasons conservatives cite for why even Reagan was unable to achieve enduring federal spending cuts.

Norquist then went a step further. "This is a Reaganite, limited-government, anti-waste and anti-duplication budget," he said. "It certainly makes those Republican critics who said that Trump would be a big-spending populist look like idiots."

Trump didn't run as a government-cutter during the campaign. He explicitly promised to leave Social Security and Medicare spending alone, which his first budget largely does. He campaigned on a populist platform emphasizing both economic and cultural solidarity with mostly white working-class voters.
...
"When you've got $20 trillion in debt, it's nice to see a White House that's actually interested in the issue," said Andy Roth, vice president of government affairs at the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative group that was critical of Trump during the primaries. "We welcome the spending cuts."

"A lot of the cuts are thoughtful cuts, not just blunt cuts," Edwards said. "People are getting trapped on disability where frankly they should be in the workforce."
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There is more.

Let's hope he does a better job than Reagan at holding down spending.  Reagan had to deal with a Democrat House majority which hampered his efforts.  Trump actually did embrace the "penny plan" which cut the growth of spending by about 2 percent annually in order to balance the budget.

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