By passing Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into an incomprehensibly reckless plan.
www.theatlantic.com
In their heedless rush to enact a
deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a
scene in
The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After that, things go as you might expect.
Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors’ sanity. As of today’s 50–50 Senate vote, with
Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie, the House and Senate have passed their own versions of the bill. The final details still have to be negotiated, but the foundational elements are clear enough. Congress is about to impose immense harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.
Given that
President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in
TheSopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises:
Why are they doing this?
Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.
Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.
Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a
pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” he explained.
Trump was nodding at the claim that cuts to health-care subsidies and food assistance would be limited to fraudulent beneficiaries and other waste. Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it
could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.
