THE ART OF THE DEAL… The Sell Mode…  One of the problems, among many, of having a President whose experience before being elected to the high office is that market place Capitalism is based on the idea that to make the most money one must make the best deal. If a bending of truth or indeed if outright lying is thought to be the best way to get the best deal, then everything is fair if it works.  Concurrently we have seen media flurry over the President’s tweeting that President Obama hacked Trump Tower while he still occupied the White Office and the Congress rollout of the “replacement” of the Affordable Care Act. There has been absolutely no indication that such hacking took place. No Republican official and no official from the other party has given any evidence to support the President's claim.  The person who was inaugurated President promised that he and his party would throw out the Affordable Care Act and put in its place a program to make health care in America better than it has ever been. The President also refers often to other pre-election promises that he is finding more difficult to keep than he expected them to be.  The border wall is one of those.  

Representative Duncan Hunter, member of the house who represents people in Alpine and the surrounding area, is wondering which budgets will have to be adjusted to meet the multi-billion cost of building a wall between the United States and Mexico. The San Diego Union Tribune carried a story about Representative Hunter’s concerns.  Not so tentatively the Office of Management of the Budget includes specific cuts to the proposed budget to make up the cost of Building the Wall and some of the other “promises” made to American voters before the election. The draft plan of the Office of Management and Budget, according to the local newspaper, “would slash the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides relief after hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters.  The Coast Guard’s $9.1 billion would be cut 14% to about $7.8 billion, while the TSA and FEMA budgets would be reduced about 11 percent each to $4.5 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.”  The Union Tribune also goes on to detail other changes in the budget including The Department of Homeland Security.  In that section of the article about Rep. Hunter’s concerns, the newspaper article says, “The plan puts the administration in the unusual position of trading spending on security programs for other security priorities at the southern border, raising questions among Republican lawmakers and homeland-security experts.”

A few weeks ago Representative Hunter himself was reported to be in hot water for unlawfully charging some personal cost of living expenses in Alpine and some vacation expenses to his office’s budget.  Mr. Hunter made some significant changes in his office budget and returned some money to the Government.

“OMB has always treated the Coast Guard like a little piggy bank that they can go after whenever they need money for anything else,” Hunter said.  “If the President is serious about getting after the cartels and getting after drug networks, this makes no sense.”