Portside

Remember: The US Treasury is obligated to make payments. The rest is optics.

On Tax Day, there’s more than one elephant in the room, and they’re all in mansions.

Biden has, at times, seemed sympathetic to Republican arguments to increase the age of retirement as a way to keep Social Security solvent and to modify how benefits are calculated adjusting for inflation -- maybe resulting in lower benefits.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing to kick military recruiters out of high schools and off Twitch. And she’s right: the military’s recruitment strategy of preying on low-income and working-class students is grotesque.

Right now, government money is flowing. But soon the self-appointed guardians of “fiscal responsibility” will call for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP, while leaving the defense budget and large tax breaks for the wealthy intact.

The U.S. already spends more than the next seven countries combined on a military that is seemingly incapable of either winning or ending any of the wars it’s been engaged in since September 2001.

...according to the Children's Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent -- so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

Top Democrats keep aiding and abetting what Dr. King called “the madness of militarism.”

Of course, presidential budgets rarely come to pass. But President Trump’s intentions are clear, and if his recent willingness to shut down the federal government is any indication, there are plenty of fights ahead.

President Trump’s 2020 budget, released March 11, 2019, would make poverty more widespread, widen inequality and racial disparities, and increase the ranks of the uninsured.