President Donald Trump attended an Easter luncheon on Wednesday, April 1, and made shocking remarks about what the federal government should be spending money on right now.
Hint: It’s not about taking care of the very young or the very old in our country.
The president didn’t mince words when he explained that the federal government should not subsidize child care centers because it needed to focus all its funds on the war effort. He added that he doesn’t think the federal government should fund Medicaid or Medicare either.
“I told (Office of Management and Budget Secretary Russell Vought), ‘Don’t send money to child care centers because the United States can’t take care of them,'” he said. “It’s up to the states. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. There’s a lot of other people. We’re at war.”
Currently, the federal government helps partially fund child care. But in January, it cut funding to five Democratic-led blue states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York.
“We can’t take care of daycare,” he continued. “The state should take care of daycare centers, and the state should pay for it. The state should pay for it. The state would have to raise taxes, but the state should pay for it. And the state could lower taxes a little bit to make up for it.”
To this point, the Iran war has cost the United States an estimated $38 billion, with an estimated $1 billion more spent with each passing day. At the same time, fully funding and universally implementing preschool programs for every child in the United States would cost an estimated $40 billion, about the same amount.
“Day care, Medicaid, Medicare, it’s impossible to deal with all these individual things,” he concluded. “They can do it on a state by state basis. They can’t do it on a federal basis. There’s one thing we have to deal with, and that’s military protection. We have to protect our country. But all these little things, all these little frauds that are going on… all those things have to be left to the states.”
The event was livestreamed on YouTube, but the White House later set the video to private.
