The Wall Stret Journal weekend column (p. A2) headed:
'CBO Says Megabill Would Help Rich And Hurt The Poor
Did us a favor by breaking down all the stats needed to see how this lollapalooza would screw over all those who can least afford it, including multitudes of MAGAs. As The Journal notes:
"The study by Congress' nonpartisan scorekeeper looks at the combined effects of many of the House bill's tax reductions and it cuts to federal programs including Medicaid and nutrition assistance."
Adding (See graph):
"The bill's benefits increase steadily with income. Households near the middle of the income distribution would see an increased benefit of $500 to $1,000 as an annual average. The top 10% of households would see a gain of about $12,000 or 2.3% of income, largely because of tax cuts. (This is compared to 0.5%- 0.8% of income for the middle.)
The bottom 10 % of households would come out worst off, losing about $1,600 a year - mainly because of benefit cuts."
Meanwhile this same edition of the bill - if unmodified by the Senate - would "permanently extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts" - effectively adding $3.3 trillion to the national debt, e.g.
This means, if passed, the interest on the debt could double from $900 billion to $1.8 trillion by 2034. Your children and grandchildren will be coughing up nearly half their salaries on paying the interest on this debt, meaning vastly less affordability of everything across the board - from food to fuel to medical.
In a WSJ follow-up piece yesterday ('GOP Plan Hikes Deficits', p. A4) there was presented one of the most salient observations:
"In all, the bill would increase real gross domestic product by 0.5% over the decade. That is far short of the 2.8% annual growth rate House Republicans claim. The additional budget deficits would counteract that growth, crowding out private investment and driving up interest rates by an average of 14 basis points above CBO forecasts. The bill would then add to budget deficits by $2.4 trillion through 2034 - on top of the $21 trillion the country would incur if Congress does nothing and the 2017 tax cuts expire as scheduled at the end of the year."
To fix ideas, it is instructive to see the effects of this monstrosity on my own state of Colorado. Basically, it could push food assistance in Colorado into a vicious cycle of funding cuts. In addition, a peril of increasing mistakes would
emerge in determining eligibility, i.e. for SNAP and Medicaid, and further funding cuts to punish those
mistakes, Gov. Jared Polis warned in a
letter to congressional leaders
The vile bill which passed the House and is currently in the
Senate, would require states to pay 75% of the cost to administer the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which offers low-income people a
monthly allowance to purchase food.
Currently, the federal government splits the cost evenly with
states. If the ratio shifted, Colorado would have to come up with an additional
$47 million to fund the workers at county human services departments who
determine SNAP eligibility.
The bill, backed by President Donald Trump, would also require
states to start paying a share of the food benefits themselves. The state
estimates it could have to come up with anywhere from $130 million to $259
million annually to pay its share, depending on the language in the final bill.
Colorado can’t come up with that amount of cash, particularly
given the state’s constitutional limits on raising taxes, Polis — a Democrat —
and 10 people working in human services and agriculture said in the letter.
State lawmakers had to close a $1.2 billion budget hole for the upcoming fiscal
year, and warned that Colorado could face an even bigger gap next year, with
fewer options to fill it.
“Devoid of purpose, this provision is simply a budget gimmick
in Washington, D.C., and a devastating blow to states,” the letter said.
If funding for counties doing the work decreases, mistakes
will increase, the letter said. Since the bill includes a provision punishing
states with higher error rates with more funding cuts, the damage could spiral,
particularly since the bill doesn’t include any time for the states to prepare,
the letter said. If that happened, the state’s share of the benefits could rise
as high as $324 million.
Colorado previously lost
about $13.1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
to help schools and food banks purchase locally grown produce. The USDA
also reduced
emergency food assistance because of concerns that undocumented
immigrants benefited from it.
Overall, 42 percent of Americans oppose the budget bill
“changing tax, spending and Medicaid policies” that narrowly passed in May by the Republican-controlled
U.S. House of Representatives, compared with 23 percent of Americans who
support the bill, and 34 percent who say they have no opinion.
Opinions on extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are mixed. A 71
percent majority supports extending tax cuts for individuals with incomes under
$100,000, as do 53 percent when asked about individuals with incomes between
$100,000 and $200,000. But support drops to 29 percent for lengthening tax cuts
for individuals with income above $400,000 and 30 percent for corporations.
In the end, the GOP seems not to grasp that they are literally 'swimming against the public tide' by pushing this 1.000 page offal on us. The fact is Americans broadly support increasing or maintaining existing levels of funding for popular safety net programs including SNAP, Medicaid and Social Security and Medicare. This according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Here are some aspects of opposition to the Reeps policy agenda the AP/NORC study found:
- Most Americans want Medicaid and SNAP funding increased or kept as it is.
- Many, indeed, see Medicaid and food assistance programs as underfunded even as the GOP Congress proposes significant cuts to Medicaid and food & nutrition assistance.
- About half of U.S. adults say "too little" funding goes to Medicaid, which is a government health care program for low income people and those with disabilities.
- 45% say food and nutrition program funding needs to stay the same or be increased.
Lastly, as recent AARP Bulletin columns have observed, there is nearly $350 billion in UNPAID care already in this country. That covers single (often older) caretakers of seriously ill or disabled relatives on Medicare or Medicaid. Thus, they should not be forced into working for their benefits as the GOP's scrooges have proposed.
See Also:
Excerpt:
As Republicans crafted their One Big Beautiful Bill, Sen.
Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) offered a warning:
“Our voters support social insurance programs. More than that, our voters
depend on those programs.”
While House Republicans ignored his pleas, opting to pass a
bill with cuts
to Medicaid that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would lead
to 7.8 million fewer people with coverage, Hawley was onto something. There’s
strong evidence that voters whom President Donald Trump brought into the
Republican Party over his three presidential runs will be especially affected
by the proposed funding changes to health care.
A quick glance at the counties with the biggest Republican
swings in the Trump era bears this out: In county after county and state after
state, Trump made disproportionate gains among lower-income voters, many of
whom rely on Medicaid — a program that covers nearly 80 million Americans
nationwide.
And:
Excerpt:
If you don’t have anything nice to say, just make something
up instead.
That’s the strategy Republican politicians have adopted in
hopes of selling their regressive, unpopular budget bill to voters, as an even
harsher version of the legislation now makes its way through
the Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is already deeply underwater, voter-wise. Multiple polls now
show that about twice
as many Americans oppose the bill as support it. This should not be a
surprise, given that this legislation is effectively a mash-up of
multiple past GOP initiatives that, individually, had each
been among
the worst-polling major bills in recent history.
For example, the OBBB includes tax cuts that
disproportionately benefit the wealthy; when Republicans last did this, with
their 2017 tax overhaul, the legislation garnered more opposition than support
in virtually
every poll. The OBBB also includes a sort of backdoor
Obamacare repeal by slashing Medicaid and other measures. As
battle-scarred Republicans might remember, their last attempt to repeal the
Affordable Care Act so enraged voters that the party suffered a watershed
wipeout in the subsequent
midterms.
Here, voters’ revulsion happens to be grounded in data
(which, candidly, is not always the case). As I’ve
noted before, the OBBB could easily become the largest single transfer of
wealth from poor to rich in U.S. history.
And:
Excerpt:
H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill, manages to be the worst
of both worlds. It spends an eye-watering amount our country can ill afford and
directs almost all of that money to the wealthiest while cutting critical
services for low- and middle-income Americans.
The bill’s significant cuts
to health
care and food
programs have drawn the most attention. But even a tax provision
included to help families, by increasing the child tax credit,
would block the neediest households from receiving new benefits while piling on
more aid for those with higher incomes.
We study poverty, taxes and the safety net, and we have
researched the child tax credit for years. Under current policy, the credit
promises families up to $2,000 per child annually. In reality, 1
in 4 children nationwide cannot receive this full amount.
The reason: The credit requires a minimum income level to
qualify at all and then slowly scales up with family income until hitting the
maximum amount. This “trapezoid”
structure leaves children in low- and moderate-income families ineligible for
the full credit. H.R. 1 not only keeps this structure but also ensures that
many households with two working parents would receive no additional help from
the expanded credit.
H.R.1 would raise the maximum credit to $2,500 per child. A
two-adult, two-child family could, in theory, gain up to $1,000. But because
the bill doesn’t change the credit’s formula, it would make it harder for
families to access the higher credit. The same size family would need an
additional $12,000 in income, or at least $48,000 total, to receive the full
$5,000 credit for their two children ($2,500 each).
This effectively locks out families with incomes below
$60,000 of any meaningful gains. Nationwide, 22 million children — 1 in 3 — would be ineligible for the full $2,500
credit. The majority of those children, 17 million, would see nothing at all
from the credit increase, while 5 million would see only a partial increase.
That means families with higher incomes, up to $400,000, would reap the full
benefit, while families just scraping by would not.
And:
Excerpt:
It is hard to think of a less coherent pair of policies:
President Trump’s tax policy encourages the very offshoring that his tariffs
are intended to stop.
Take the more than $600 billion pharmaceutical industry.
Over the past few months, Mr. Trump and his associates have repeatedly
criticized companies’ moves to offshore much drug making, particularly to
Ireland. “We can’t be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental
things that we need,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 13.
But the tax incentives in Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax and spending
package helped generate this problem in the first place — a problem that would
continue under the Republican bill under consideration. Mr. Trump’s Tax Cuts
and Jobs Act created a loophole that made it far more profitable for the
pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and
Merck, to manufacture some of their most profitable drugs in Ireland.
Unsurprisingly, that is what happened, with America’s imports of pharmaceuticals
soaring to $250 billion in 2024, way up from $110 billion in 2016.
And:
by Imran Khalid | June 18, 2025 - 4:54am | permalink
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
In the shadow of a Trump belligerent presidency and with an economy staggering under its own contradictions, the United States finds itself teetering on a precarious precipice where populist policymaking, fiscal illusions, and dwindling international faith in U.S. Treasury bonds are aligning to form a slow-motion crisis. Whether it’s labeled “Big Beautiful Bill” or cloaked in the language of patriotic economic revival, the endgame looks less like American greatness and more like an exercise in fiscal self-sabotage.
As of early June 2025, the U.S. Treasury yield curve—often a harbinger of economic angst—has begun blinking bright red again. Goldman Sachs, in its latest report, now predicts 30-year Treasury yields could exceed 6 percent, with 10-year yields potentially climbing above 5 percent, levels unseen in more than two decades. The spike is no statistical anomaly. It’s symptomatic of a deeper malaise: a confluence of monetary hardening, fiscal recklessness, and eroding global trust.
» article continues...
And:
Excerpt:
Senate
Republicans are preparing to slice deeper into Medicaid to finance President
Donald Trump’s agenda, proposing legislation that
analysts say could deal a greater financial blow to hospitals and result
in millions more
uninsured Americans.
The measure
reflects Republicans’ willingness to cut the nation’s safety-net health
insurance program, despite qualms
expressed by some moderates and populists within their ranks.
“The Senate
just made a bad bill worse,” Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American
Hospitals, said in a statement. “Rural communities would take the hardest hit,
with struggling hospitals compelled to face difficult decisions about what
services to cut.
And:
Excerpt:
There’s so much wrong with the sprawling budget bill that
the House just passed and the Senate is debating — I refuse to call it by its
cringey name — that it seems myopic to fixate on a provision that probably
wouldn’t make anyone’s top 10. And yet I find myself stuck on this
new tax Congress would impose on electric cars. Not because of the
policy itself, but because the way it’s being enacted testifies to the utter
corruption of conservative thought.
Technically speaking, the proposed $250 annual levy on EVs
(and $100 annually for owners of hybrids) isn’t a tax — it’s a fee.
