Austerity For Us, Exemptions For Them— Mission Accomplished: Medicaid Slashed, Silencers Untaxed

Most Popular Bill Ever According to Señor T’s Imaginary Friends…GOP To USA: Drop Dead (But Not ’Til After Midterms)

Let's show Trump how popular his bill really is a week from Thursday

When putting together their Big Ugly Bill, Republicans were tricky enough to schedule the worst of it to not come crashing down on voters’ heads until after the midterms. Though the “bill sets in motion nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other health policy changes that could loom over the midterm elections… the real effects likely won't be felt until well after the ballots are cast. Despite negative polls and headlines, bill supporters could be insulated from political blame by a slow drip of policy changes that will play out over the next decade… ‘Republicans backloaded a lot of the Medicaid and ACA cuts,’ said Larry Levitt, executive vice president at KFF. ‘There will be few tangible effects in health care from this bill before the midterms… There's not going to be a day where everyone wakes up and all of a sudden... more people are uninsured [though] People covered through the Affordable Care Act exchanges will see changes more swiftly. The bill does not extend the Biden-era enhanced premium subsidies, which are set to expire on Jan. 1, 2026. The GOP-led Congress still can do so, but has shown little appetite so far. Obamacare premiums would increase by more than 75% on average for enrollees next year without the enhanced subsidies... Medicaid funding of Planned Parenthood will also be cut off for next year under the bill— a change the family planning organization said could result in the closure of nearly 200 clinics.”

Other wretched provisions of the bill that will go into effect faster aren’t the kinds of existential things voters pay close attention to. “Special tax breaks for venture capitalists, Alaskan fisheries, spaceports, private schools, rum makers and others— together costing tens of billions of dollars— quietly caught a ride on Republicans’ sprawling domestic policy megabill.” Congressional Republicans, wrote Brian Faler last week, “added a new crop of unrelated, bespoke tax breaks... Many are the sort of narrowly targeted breaks Republicans have long complained are unfair, reward influential special interests and unnecessarily complicate the tax code.”

Other than the special interests being served by these “special provisions,” most people will never hear about any of them and none will become issues in the midterms.

There’s a $17 billion expansion of a little-known provision that enables venture capitalists to make a fortune tax-free.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) won a carve-out for the oil and gas industry from a minimum tax on big corporations that was created during the Biden administration.

There’s a $2 billion break important to the rum industry and, tangentially, Louisiana, said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a tax writer.

“We have the highest per capita intake of alcohol in the nation,” he said.

… Some House Republicans grumbled about the provisions— “loaded with pork to buy key Senate votes,” the chamber’s hard-right Freedom Caucus said in a memo to colleagues. But House lawmakers backed down from threats to sink the plan over fiscal concerns and other complaints, and approved it Thursday on a 218-214 vote that sends it to Trump for his signature into law.

Even as Senate Republicans added their own provisions to the legislation, they deleted some earmarks that had been approved by the House.

Though some of the add-ons are small— like an increase in a special deduction for certain Alaskan whaling captains to buy weapons and maintain their boats— others have price tags that run in the billions.

The bill includes an expansion of a little-known break that Silicon Valley investors have used to nix tax bills on tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings from Internet startups. Another spends $26 billion to create a new $1,700 credit for people who give to groups providing scholarships for children to attend private school.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) secured a $7 billion tax cut for farmers that allows them to postpone paying some of the capital gains taxes they owe when selling off farmland.

There’s also a $1 billion provision allowing “spaceports”— which the legislation defines as “any facility located at or in close proximity to a launch site or reentry site”— to sell tax-exempt bonds, like airports. Sen. Ron Wyden, the chamber’s top Democratic tax writer, said in a Twitter post that “Trump’s wedding gift to [Jeff] Bezos and birthday gift to [Elon] Musk were tucked in the new budget bill.”

… And Senate Republicans not only kept a House-approved provision exempting gun silencers from a long-standing $200 tax on firearms— they dumped the tax on all guns it applied to, except machine guns and what the legislation terms “a destructive device.” That cost: $1.7 billion.

These circumstances allow Trump and congressional Republicans to lie to voters and claim, among other things, that the Big Ugly Bill is the most popular in history… even though it’s the most unpopular in history. Trump can depend on right-wing media to back him up… and on MAGAts being too stupid to know the difference. CNN’s Daniel Dale, the fact checker, knows the difference.

Señor TACO, wrote Dale of the bill “that ‘it’s the most popular bill ever signed in the history of our country,’ adding for emphasis that ‘this is the single most popular bill ever signed.’ That is an up-is-down reversal of reality. The bill is wildly unpopular, poll after poll has found... In a Fox News poll in mid-June, 59% of registered voters said they opposed the bill and 38% said they favored it, with another 3% saying they didn’t know. In a Quinnipiac University poll in late June, 55% of registered voters said they opposed the bill and 29% said they supported it, with another 16% not weighing in. In a Pew Research Center poll in early June, 49% of adults said they were opposed and 29% said they were in favor, with 21% unsure.”

Reviewing these numbers and the similar findings of two other polls about the bill, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten said on air on Monday: “You just never see numbers this poor. I have been trying to look through the history books to find if there was another piece of legislation that was on the verge of passing that was as unpopular as this one, and…I cannot find one.”

CNN senior reporter Aaron Blake reported June 20 that the polling numbers made the bill “more unpopular than any piece of major legislation passed since at least 1990, according to data crunched by George Washington University political science professor Chris Warshaw.” And in an analysis published Friday, before Trump spoke, data journalist G. Elliott Morris wrote, “On average across pollsters and methods, 31% of Americans support the One Big Beautiful Bill, while 54% oppose it. That net rating of -23 is, to put it mildly, absolutely abysmal.”

… The president also made other false claims in his White House remarks:

– A false claim that “we’ve delivered … no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” The bill does not completely eliminate tax on Social Security; rather, it creates a temporary additional tax deduction of $6,000 per person age 65 and older every year from 2025 through 2028 (it’s a smaller deduction for individuals earning more than $75,000 per year). The White House has said that 88% of seniors will not pay tax on Social Security benefits with this additional deduction in place, up from 64% not paying tax on those benefits under current law, but even if the White House is right, the millions of seniors in the remaining 12% will still have to pay— and so will some Social Security recipients under the age of 65, who do not get this new deduction.

– A false claim, which Trump has made repeatedly, that President Joe Biden allowed in “21 million” migrants. Through December 2024, the last full month under Biden, the country had recorded  under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total is 21 million.

The party of greed, selfishness and bigotry didn’t just write a cruel, corrupt piece of legislation— rigging the timing to dodge political consequence and sprinkling in pork to buy off those who needed to be bought off— they then had the gall to turn around and lie about it being “the most popular bill in history.” This is how kleptocracies work: wealth gets siphoned upward, rights get stripped quietly, and the damage gets deferred just long enough to fool a few more voters. They’re not repairing government; they’re gutting it and calling it reform— serving billionaires, killing Medicaid, lying to seniors, silencing facts and shooting democracy full of holes... all while grinning through their grift. And if Democratic leaders like Schumer and Jeffries can’t summon the talent and fury to expose it— really expose it— then shame on them too.