From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, February 26th.

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you're talking real money.

That's one way to look at the House budget resolution passed last night that could reshape the country for the next decade,

by the way it spends cuts and borrows money in its 10-year plan.

One central question, is this a reverse Robin Hood budget taking for poor and working class and disabled to give to the rich? As the New York Times describes it, the budget resolution itself is silent on whether Congress cuts Medicaid,

which provides health coverage to 72 million poor and disabled Americans.

But it instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee,

which has jurisdiction over the program, to cut spending by $880 billion over the next decade.

The Times goes on to point out that Medicaid and Medicare are the bulk of what that committee

has jurisdiction over.

So it would be hard for it to save $880 billion in other ways.

And that even that whole $880 billion is just one piece of the $4.5 trillion the budget allocates in tax cuts.

But on morning edition today, maybe you heard this Republican Congressman Tim Burchett

of Tennessee argued they could cut that much fat from the Medicaid bureaucracy without affecting

people's actual benefits.

He used this story from the 1980s to make his case.

I can remember when President Reagan was in, and there was a delivery service of,

it was for every dollar that was distributed, it cost a dollar to a dollar and a half to get it to these people,

and he cut that distributor, he cut that

middleman, so to speak out. And that's a lot of what we're going to do. And of course, we're

finding so much fraud, waste and abuse in these groups. Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee.

So as they say on Marketplace, let's do the numbers. With us now, Jacob Bogaj,

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