16 Thoughts On The Republican Budget Atrocity

The pain needs to be in front of them, not behind them

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

• This bill is vile to a degree that befits the devil’s bargain Republicans made with Donald Trump. Indeed, this bill is why they made the bargain a decade ago. As time passed, they naturally stopped thinking of it as a devil’s bargain and simply started seeing it as a great bargain—civic degeneracy and social darwinism became the GOP’s favorite flavor combination. But a bill like this is what made the arrangement work in the first place.

• Trump thus surpasses George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan in the pantheon of American right-wing elites who have sought to tax cut the government into austerity for the poor. Bush got the tax cuts done, but the beast just grew. All it took was dialing the bad faith and deceit up from a six to an 11.

• The bill passes as the Trump economy is softening as anticipated. The data is mixed, but the economy is weaker now than when Trump took over, mostly because of things he’s already done. In the medium run, this bill will tend to raise prices and cost jobs, exacerbating the damage.

• But in the short run I expect this bill will change very little. Reckless as it is, making Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent doesn’t flood the economy with more inflationary money than is currently circulating; meanwhile, most of the bill’s austerity measures don’t take effect for quite a while. As law, this should exacerbate inflation expectations, but Trump’s opportunism seems to scramble those a bit. (All bets are off if Trump tries to fire Jerome Powell, though.)

• One more caveat: The bill’s hundred-billion dollar ICE slush fund and gulag budget could dampen the economy on both the expectations and material side by crushing immigrant labor supply. Dragnets will multiply, more immigrants will hide.

• Quite apart from the economics, this secret police force and the prison network that will be built for it, is the most repugnant and frightening aspect of the bill; Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps can be funded again, clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network, overseen by Trump-loyal paramilitaries, with no resources for due process, will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. This is Stephen Miller’s wet dream and it will stain the whole country.

• Monitor independent news and investigative reporting at reputable outlets. There is no way to build a police bureaucracy at this scale, on this timeline, without attracting tons of corruption, sloppiness, and abuse. We know this from recent experience. I would bet that, in the not too distant future, we’ll learn ICE hired Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, and other criminal thugs.

• The fact that Republicans passed this thing in defiance of horrible public-opinion polling and widespread internal misgivings about the harm it will do should create a pretty strong presumption that they would have done this under just about any circumstances. Sometimes bad shit happens (e.g. the 2024 election) and we can trace it back to Democratic Party or liberal-elite failures, but I don’t think this is one of those cases.

• That said, we can only run the experiment one time, and we don’t know what would have happened if, e.g., Washington had been inundated with huge crowds of protesters, as when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act.

• You can quibble with various messaging and dilatory tactics, and I take very large issue with the broader nature of Democratic opposition over the past six months—if Democrats were better street fighters and (thus) Trump was three or four or five points less popular, maybe the bill fails. But overall, in this particular fight, Dems did about all they could.

• There’s definitely no bill if Dems had won a few more House seats than they did in November. We can apportion blame for that in many different ways (Biden, inflation, false perceptions of the economy, New York, etc.) but the one Dems have most control over going forward is banal swing-voter shit. Dems need to become competitive in more districts and states.

• This bill should help them achieve that goal even without changing issue positions or nailing candidate recruitment or whatever else. But it’s not a foregone conclusion.

• I’ll write more about this next week, but: We know from very, very recent history that Americans in prospering communities can be made to believe that the economy in the rest of the country is disastrous. That a full-employment economy is in recession. Or, conversely, that their economic misfortunes are the exception, not the rule. This bill won’t be self-discrediting—Republicans will spin the consequences aggressively and dishonestly and we should expect that to work fairly well if Democrats aren’t aggressively contesting GOP lies. Ideally, they won’t wait until the consequences materialize.

• This isn’t just me being neurotic. Consider this exchange I had with Brian Schatz last night. While it’d be a mistake to confuse a tweet for a grand strategic template, I do think this idea—“it will be obvious who to blame”—still predominates Democratic Party thinking. Material circumstances and empirical reality matter most; the truth will out. If Democrats build their accountability plans around that belief, they’re much more likely to fail.

• To really max out on transforming this bill into an albatross, Democrats would need to embrace more procedural hardball than they’ve ever had the stomach for. News stories about closing hospitals and the ailing uninsured will be useful, but Republican know how to fight truth with propaganda. What commitments are Democrats willing to make ahead of the midterms and the 2028 elections about how they intend to undo all this? Will they simply seek to undo these cuts, or will they insist on broader reforms, so that Republicans live to regret doing this, and we don’t enter a cycle of defunding and refunding Medicaid every few years? Will Democrats help Republicans waive paygo rules at the end of the year, to forestall the huge Medicare cuts this bill triggers? Or will they insist that all health-care beneficiaries be made whole? What will they do when Republicans try to pass more bailout money for rural hospitals? If the economy enters recession and Trump comes begging for help?

• Even those of us not directly affected by the Republican health care cuts will see the impact as it hits our friends, family members, neighbors, and even ourselves indirectly, as hospitals close, premiums increase. We have a duty to share those stories in a way that emphasizes who’s to blame.