Key Points – President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” encompassing extensions of his 2017 tax cuts, elimination of taxes on tips/overtime, and billions for border security, narrowly passed the House of Representatives early Thursday, May 22nd, with just one vote to spare.
-The legislation faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
-Analyses from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation project the bill will add trillions to the national debt over the next decade, prompting a recent credit rating downgrade from Moody’s and concerns among bond investors.
-Critics also decry the bill as a regressive upward transfer of wealth.
The Big, Beautiful Bill Is A Debt Bomb
President Trump’s major legislative agenda, which he calls the “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed the House of Representatives in the early hours of Thursday, after weeks of wrangling, and with just one vote to spare.
The passage beat House Speaker Mike Johnson’s deadline of Memorial Day, but faces an uncertain future in the U.S. Senate, where it seems unlikely to pass as is. Trump’s
The bill, per CNN, “contains many of [Trump’s] campaign trail promises, such as extending his 2017 tax breaks and eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay. It also devotes billions to border security, allowing for a major crackdown on immigration. In multiple sit-downs with GOP lawmakers this week, Trump made forceful appeals to members to back his agenda.”
Ultimately, two Republicans, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Warren Davidson (R-OH), voted against the bill, joining every Democrat, while Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) voted present. One Republican, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), missed the late-night vote because he had fallen asleep.
And as pointed out by several commentators on Thursday, three House Democrats have died in office since last November’s election, most recently Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) earlier this week.
This, in addition to the current discourse about former President Biden, has sparked considerable criticism of Democrats for their overreliance on older lawmakers, as well as the lawmakers’ reluctance to retire when they become ill or elderly. If any of them had retired earlier and been replaced by another Democrat, the bill would not have had the votes to pass.
Another concerned party, after the passage of the Trump bill? The bond market.
Worries About Debt
The bill is likely to add significantly to the deficit and national debt, with Republicans seeming to abandon either any pretense of fiscal conservatism or the Reagan-era argument that tax cuts will pay for themselves.
According to CNBC, the “U.S. debt-and-deficit situation is bad and facing real prospects of getting worse, triggering a high-profile credit rating downgrade from Moody’s and another selling stampede in stocks and bonds.” And this arrived on top of the chaos with tariffs, which has not yet been resolved in any meaningful way.
Moody’s had announced the credit downgrade earlier this week.
“Without adjustments to taxation and spending, we expect budget flexibility to remain limited, with mandatory spending, including interest expense, projected to rise to around 78% of total spending by 2035 from about 73% in 2024. If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case, it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade.”
The trouble could take a while to materialize.
“I feel like the dam is finally starting to break a little bit, and there’s too many holes in the dike to put our fingers in,” Mitch Goldberg, president of ClientFirst Strategy, told CNBC.
“The issue is that if the cost of debt financing keeps going up, we’re going to find ourselves in a time of austerity, kind of like the European Union was about 10 years ago.”
The Problem of Regression
There’s another big case against the “Big Beautiful Bill”: it represents a major upward transfer of wealth, possibly the largest such transfer in history.
Despite all the talk of Trump governing as a tribune of the working class, the bill represents taking away benefits from lower-income people and shifting resources to tax cuts for the wealthy, as noted in a Vox analysis this week by Dylan Matthews.
“The bill’s ultimate contents are still evolving, and the Republican-led Senate will have to weigh in, but the broad outlines are simple: trillions in tax cuts, tilted to the wealthy; hundreds of billions in spending cuts, particularly to programs for the poor like Medicaid and food stamps; over a hundred billion dollars in increased spending for defense.”
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
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