Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com

The Trump budget proposal is filled with so many bogus assumptions and so much creative accounting it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Indeed, people in both parties on Capitol Hill are treating it as a joke.

But there is a central, cohering direction – make America’s put-upon rich people even richer while sticking it to poorer people, many of whom, deluded by Trump’s demagoguery and such right-wing propaganda organs as Fox “News,’’ voted for the mogul. (Meanwhile, many Democrat-inclined people were too lazy tomake it to the polls.) You have to give the  hateand fake-conspiracy peddlers at Fox credit – the network has very good production values.

Of course, the richer the rich get, the more they control the government and the more that they’re able to further enrich themselves in a vicious or at least lucrative circle.

An essential part of the Trump budget is the assumption, or, rather, assertion, that it will somehow be paid for by increased economic growth – more of what George H.W. Bush used to call “voodoo economics.’’ The promise is that annual gross domestic product growth will rise to 3 percent, even as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects only a 1.9 percent rate. That’s because the CBO technicians wisely take into consideration, among other things, our aging population and falling productivity.

Most administrations – including Obama’s – havecooked (or massaged?) the books and often projected considerably higher GDP growth than happens. But the assumptions in the Trump plan are particularly egregious given the Niagara of retiring Baby Boomers and the big proposed tax cuts.

For  many Boomers, by the way – especially the richer ones -- Trump is relatively kindly. Older white Baby Boomers vote heavily Republican, and he has vowed not to touch gigantically expensive Medicare or regular Social Security – by far the two biggest entitlement programs – which of course benefit them.

He promised in the campaign not to cut Medicaid. Now he wants to slash Medicaid, Food Stamps and Social Security Disability Insurance. That isn’t to say that Medicaid can’t use some major improvements, such as reducing the amount of unnecessary care and in some cases including work requirements for recipients. And Social Security Disability Insurance has long been rife with abuse. But the fact is that most of the people who benefit from these programs are honest and truly needy. Indeed, most are far more honest than Donald Trump.

Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist, described Trump’s “ideology’’ well when he called it “pluto-populism” -- “policies that benefit plutocrats, justified by populist rhetoric.”