Conservatives Don’t Like Trump’s And MAGA Mike’s Big Ugly Bill Either

Wrecking America To Make The Rich Richer

"Big, Beautiful Golden Deal" by Nancy Ohanian

Nick Catoggio, previously Allahpundit of Hot Air, has been a long-time anti-progressive online voice and is still a dependably conservative writer who now does a column for Jonah Goldberg’s rightwing Dispatch. “What’s striking about The One Big Beautiful Bill,” he wrote yesterday, “is that it makes no pretense of trying to grapple seriously with America’s problems, even though it’s the centerpiece of the president’s agenda. It’s big-picture stuff. Unlike a continuing resolution hastily thrown together at the last second to avert a government shutdown, whatever the House and Senate end up sending to Donald Trump’s desk in this case will shape the next decade of American fiscal policy and define his political legacy. It may well be the only major legislation he and his party enact during his second term. So one might think Republicans would want to seize the opportunity to put the country on the proverbial right track, particularly knowing that Senate Democrats can’t stop them under the simple-majority rules of budget reconciliation. Instead, what they’ve barfed up makes sense only as a sort of formal surrender of America’s status as a serious country.”

It reminds me of the New York magazine story that went viral a few weeks ago about rampant cheating among college students using artificial intelligence. Letting a computer generate your work product isn’t something you do if you’re striving to improve yourself by learning the material. It’s something you do when you don’t care about self-improvement and are living only for the moment, hoping to pass the class by whatever means.

House Republicans have given up on trying to improve the country. All they wanted was to pass the class, which they did this morning by a single vote on the House floor. The One Big Beautiful Bill is to legislation what an AI-generated essay is to education.

… Handed total control of government last fall, the best the GOP could do in the House this week was move a package that will produce another $3.1 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Other estimates are more pessimistic.) The United States is currently on pace to reach its highest-ever level of national debt as a percentage of GDP by 2032, exceeding the benchmark set 80 years ago when it was borrowing like mad to fund the biggest war in history on two fronts. Incredibly, a House bill written and passed by Republicans will accelerate that timeline.

And this can’t be stressed enough: $3.1 trillion is the best-case scenario.

That number is based on assumptions of steady economic growth and low-ish interest rates in the U.S. over the next decade. Such things can no longer be taken for granted after the president started the dumbest trade war in history, raising the risk of a global recession and spooking bond markets. It is insane that the House would respond to spiking anxiety about America’s fiscal stability by piling on even more debt, knowing how investors were bound to react. But it has.

A few days ago, economist Jessica Riedl noted that if interest rates settled at 4.5 percent over the next 30 years instead of the 3.6 percent assumed by CBO, our country would be on the hook for an additional— deep breath— $40 trillion in interest payments during that period.

Once upon a time, an argument on the right for elevating Trump was that he would throttle the RINOs who were forever promising to balance the national books before wilting when given the chance. Making America great again would require making America solvent again and he was just the main to do it. The reality this week was precisely the opposite: Fiscal conservatives, not RINO spendthrifts, were the ones muscled into compliance by the president.

The bill also amounts to a political betrayal if you take populism seriously, which, of course, you shouldn’t.

Ideologues like Steve Bannon warned Republicans not to slash Medicaid, knowing that millions of lower-income voters who rely on the program have swung right in the Trump era. Trump himself told the House GOP earlier this week not to “fuck-around” with the program beyond cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the eternal scapegoat for officials who don’t want to reckon seriously with the country’s fiscal predicament.

Unfortunately for Republicans, there was nothing else in the budget they could realistically cut that would produce big savings without triggering a political backlash. Medicare, Social Security, and defense are off limits for now (but not for long!) and interest payments on America’s debt are non-negotiable. So in the end, they had no choice but to fuck around with Medicaid: The new work requirements and paperwork standard for the program set forth in the House bill are projected to push 7.6 million blue-collar enrollees out.

That would be defensible in populist terms, perhaps, if most of the other economic benefits under the bill were set to accrue to the working class. They aren’t.

Per CBO, the reforms to Medicaid and food stamps in the legislation mean that the poorest 10 percent of Americans will see their overall household resources decline as a percentage of income over the next decade, while the richest 10 percent will see their resources rise. The tax cuts under the bill will save a family that earns under $50,000 annually less than $300 in 2027, not quite a dollar a day.

… Even the process by which the bill passed was a travesty. “If something is beautiful, you don’t do it after midnight,” Rep. Thomas Massie, one of two Republicans to oppose the bill, said of the wee-hours floor vote this morning. The Rules Committee that advanced the legislation earlier this week also met overnight before the final bill was drafted or negotiations between the various factions were complete. Longtime Republican legislative aide Brendan Buck said he’d never seen such a thing, and no wonder: Traditionally, conservatives have demanded at least 72 hours to consider legislation before it’s voted on so that they’re not left rubber-stamping bills on the speaker’s say-so.

The most one can say in defense of all of this is that everyone involved understood that the House bill won’t pass as-is in the Senate. A fiscal hawk like Rep. Chip Roy could justify voting for it simply in order to trigger negotiations with the upper chamber, reserving the right to oppose a final compromise if it doesn’t pass muster.

But if you believe there’s a chance of that final bill going down, I wonder if you’ve paid any attention to politics since 2015. Members of the president’s party are not going to snuff his signature legislation at the finish line on the grounds that it’s garbage from tip to tail. To do that, they’d need the support of their constituents, and their constituents emphatically do not care about the long-term solvency of their country. What they care about is Donald Trump getting what Donald Trump wants, whatever that might mean for America’s trajectory.

They’ve given up on self-government, so their representatives have given up on it too.

Jonathan Chait is another anti-progressive pundit, but he would probably chafe at being called a conservative, since he’s a Democrat, albeit an anti-woke conservative Democrat, a neoliberal, a charter school whore and a Zionist. Thursday, in his Atlantic column, the man who once called on Democrats to support Trump’s 2016 candidacy called the big ugly bill the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history— and not in a good way. The bill, he wrote, pairs “huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones… [T]he Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact… The House cemented the bill’s [1 vote] majority support with a series of last-minute changes whose effects have not been digested. The Congressional Budget Office has not even had time to calculate how many millions of Americans would lose health insurance, nor by how many trillions of dollars the deficit would increase. The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.”

He wants his readers to understand that “House Republicans are fully aware of the political and economic risks of this endeavor. Cutting taxes for the affluent is unpopular, and cutting Medicaid is even more so. That is why, instead of proudly proclaiming what the bill will accomplish, they are pretending it will do neither. House Republicans spent months warning of the political dangers of cutting Medicaid, a program that many of their own constituents rely on. The party’s response is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program— when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings. The less predictable dangers of their plan are macroeconomic. The bill spikes the deficit, largely because it devotes more money to lining the pockets of lawyers and CEOs than it saves by immiserating fast-food employees and ride-share drivers. Massive deficit spending is not always bad, and in some circumstances (emergencies, or recessions) it can be smart and responsible. In the middle of an economic expansion, with a large structural deficit already built into the budget, it is deeply irresponsible.”

In recent years, deficit spending has been a political free ride. With interest rates high and rising, the situation has changed. Higher deficits oblige Washington to borrow more money, which can force it to pay investors higher interest rates to take on its debt, which in turn increases the deficit even more, as interest payments (now approaching $1 trillion a year) swell. The market could absorb a new equilibrium with a higher deficit, but that resolution is hardly assured. The compounding effect of higher debt leading to higher interest rates leading to higher debt can spin out of control.

House Republicans have made clear they are aware of both the political and the economic dangers of their plan, because in the recent past, they have repeatedly warned about both. Their willingness to take them on is a measure of their profound commitment.

And while the content of their beliefs can be questioned, the seriousness of their purpose cannot. Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe— what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades— is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.

This has nothing to do with conservate opinion per se, but yesterday’s NY Times ran a piece on some of the lesser-known and unrelated pieces of the 1,116-page hodgepodge. Among the most egregious, some pointed out by The Times, some just provisions I found myself:

• A Mafia-friendly tax break for gun silencers

• A bonanza for Trump cronies in the artificial intelligence world

• A limit on the ability of federal judges to hold Trump and members of the law-breaking regime from the consequences of violating court orders

• A hugely expensive— for taxpayers— deduction to the owners of “pass-through” businesses (like the Trump family)

• Preservation of the carried interest loophole

• Defunding Planned Parenthood

• A “nonprofit killer” clause that imposes a 21% excise tax on private university endowments, meant by Republicans to stifle dissent by financially burdening progressive-leaning organizations, including universities and advocacy groups.

• Sale of public lands to fossil fuel production, accelerating  environmental degradation and reducing public access to natural resources while prioritizing corporate profits

• Rollback of Obama-era methane emissions rules

• Reversal of Net Neutrality protections

• Dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau