Key Points – President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a major tax and spending package recently passed by the House, faces significant fiscal concerns and an uncertain path in the Senate.
-Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Wharton Budget Model project it will add over $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
-This has alarmed some Republican Senators and figures like Elon Musk. Supporters, including President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, argue the tax cuts will stimulate growth sufficiently to reduce the deficit, a claim disputed by economists like Wharton’s Kent Smetters as a “work of fiction.”
The Big Beautiful Bill Has a Debt Problem for Trump
The major legislative package that President Donald Trump calls the “Big Beautiful Bill” has passed the House of Representatives and now faces an uncertain fate in the Senate.
Quite a few hurdles remain for the bill, and among them are worries that it will worsen America’s debt problem. Some Republicans are worried about that.
The Joint Committee on Taxation says the bill, if passed as is, will increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion by 2023. The Wharton Budget Model sees the number as reaching $3.3 trillion. When Moody’s lowered the nation’s credit rating, they saw deficits reaching as high as $4 trillion.
According to Axios, “there are enough Republican budget hawks in the Senate to scuttle Trump’s premier legislative accomplishment if the optimists can’t rally their votes.”
The question will be, whether Trump himself and GOP leaders in Congress can twist enough arms to get the votes to overcome the fiscal fears and pass the bill.
Republican Concerns
According to an AP story Monday, Trump’s approach to the bill has many skeptics in addition to Senate Republicans, including Elon Musk and the investor community.
“All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told the AP.
“There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.”
“This tax bill’s enormity is being underplayed … [It] will cost more than the 2017 tax cuts, the pandemic CARES Act, Biden’s stimulus, and the Inflation Reduction Act combined,” Jessica Reidl, a conservative budget analyst, told Yahoo Finance, as cited by Axios.
Even Musk, on his way out of his role as a “special government employee,” expressed disappointment in a recent interview that the Congressional spending package will increase rather than decrease the deficit.
Defending the Bill
The strategy from President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, when it comes ot defending the bill, is to call the Congressional Budget Office projections wrong, and even claim that it will in fact reduce the deficit.
“The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they’re always off, every single time, when they project economic growth,” Speaker Johnson said over the weekend on “Meet the Press.” “They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations.”
This seems to be a classic supply-side economics argument from the Reagan and Bush eras, in which it’s argued that tax cuts will “pay for themselves” thanks to economic growth.
However, Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, called such claims “a work of fiction” in a recent article.
Trump has also expressed hope that revenues from his tariffs will end up raising new forms of revenue, even musing in the past that an “external revenue service” could replace the IRS and make taxation unnecessary. But that also doesn’t seem to be a realistic possibility.
“It’s our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it’ll all happen very quickly,” Trump said earlier this spring.
Will It Pass?
It seems highly unlikely that the Senate will be able to pass the House’s version of the “Big Beautiful Bill” as is.
Per an NPR story, “big changes” could be in store for the bill as it moves through the Senate.
It is a reconciliation bill, meaning it only needs 51 votes to pass and is not subject ot the filibuster. However, if a version passes the Senate, it would need to pass the House as well, not long after it got through the longer chamber with just one vote to spare, following weeks of wrangling over different provisions.
About the Author: Stephen Silver
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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