For reasons I will not pretend to understand, we live in an age when the only truly bipartisan idea is that landmark legislation demands triple-B alliteration. President Joe Biden’s signature proposal was Build Back Better. Now, President Donald Trump has yoked his presidency — and all of us — to his “big, beautiful bill.”
Let me suggest another name for it. I’ll even stay on trend: Big Budget Bomb.
It’s always possible things will change. But as of now, the damage this bill will do to the budget if it detonates is hard to properly convey — in part because the size of this thing is hard to properly convey.
And the budget, to be honest, is where the problems this bill would cause only begin. But we have to start somewhere.
When you’re thinking about the size and cost of legislation, you have to keep in mind two different sides: how much the bill costs, either through new spending or tax cuts, and how much of that cost is paid for — versus added to the debt.
The Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about $500 billion over 10 years, and it paid for all of that spending — and more — through tax increases. The Affordable Care Act was expected to cost about $1 trillion over 10 years — all of it, again, paid for. Trump’s 2017 tax reform bill, when you added everything up, left an estimated $1.5 trillion of tax cuts unpaid.
But the Big Budget Bomb exists in a class by itself. Even a naive analysis, one that buys into some very obvious Republican budget tricks, finds that this bill cuts taxes and raises spending by $4 trillion over 10 years — but only pays for about $1.7 trillion of that.
Once you add interest on all that new debt — and we’re paying really high interest rates on that nowadays — the Big Budget Bomb puts more than $3 trillion on the national credit card over the next decade.
But let’s not fall for dumb budget tricks. The bill is full of tax cuts the Republicans have slapped expiration dates on. The way it’s written right now, it wipes out taxes on overtime, tips and car loans, but only for four years. That will all expire in 2028. But we know they have no intention of allowing those tax cuts to expire. They want to run in 2028 on the fear that Democrats will let them expire.
Republicans use this trick a lot. If you look back at those 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term, they used the same gimmick. And in this very bill, Republicans are canceling all those expiration dates.
I’d used the old “Fool me once” line, but I wasn’t fooled on this last time, and I’m not going to pretend to be fooled on it this time. But I do think it’s at least a little bit funny that the Republicans want budgetary credit for using that expiring tax-cut trick in the very same bill in which they’re also deleting their last set of expiration dates. One thing you’ll never hear me say about Trump’s Republican Party is that it lacks chutzpah.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — Washington’s saddest advocacy group — if you take seriously the permanence that the Republicans are actually seeking, the Big Budget Bomb will add about $5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. That is an insane number.
Do you remember when Trump promised to balance the budget?
That happened in March. So, here I’ve been talking about what the bill does to the budget. But there’s this other question, too — maybe the more important one: What is it trying to accomplish?
Five trillion dollars is a lot of debt, but if it would lead us to invent commercialized nuclear fusion or perfect a drug that would double our healthy life span, then fine. It’s worth it.
But here’s what this bill does in the real world: It cuts taxes mostly for richer people. It cuts Medicaid and food stamps. Republicans are also allowing some Obamacare subsidies to expire. And so the estimate is that between all this, 13 million people will lose health insurance.
It’s also grimly exact. The bill has $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people who make more than $500,000 a year. And it has $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. It is a straight transfer from people who cannot afford food and medical care to people who can afford to fly first class.
The bill also guts the tax credits that support the wind, solar, electric vehicle and nuclear power industries. China will be thrilled by that.
So when you think about this bill, you should think about risk. This is a bill that increases our risk of a fiscal crisis. What if all these other countries we’re alienating and all these investors we’re scaring stop buying our debt — even as we are creating trillions more in debt we need them to buy?
This bill increases the risk any of us face if we can’t afford health care or food for our families. It guts the safety net that millions of us would have relied on for help if Trump’s tariffs were to cause a recession. It pumps tens of billions of dollars into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities and deportation capacity, so it raises risks faced by immigrants — or anyone else — caught up in the administration’s mass deportation and detention operations.
I’ve been a policy journalist for more than 20 years. I’ve covered more bills than I can count. I cannot remember a more cruel or irresponsible piece of domestic legislation that has been seriously proposed.
And its sins are compounded by its size. If the Republicans’ Big Budget Bomb goes off, we are all in the blast radius.
Ezra Klein writes a column for the New York Times.
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