May 4 JDN 2460800

On April 10, the US House of Representatives passed a truly terrible budget bill. It passed on an almost entirely partisan vote—214 Democrats against, 216 Republicans for, 2 Republicans against. So I think it’s quite fair to say that the Republicans passed this budget—not a single Democrat voted for it, and only 2 Republicans voted against it.

So what’s so bad about it?

Well, first of all, in order to avoid showing just how much it will balloon the national debt, the new budget operates on different accounting rules than normal, using what’s called “current policy baseline” instead of the standard method of assuming that policies will end after 10 years.

In addition to retaining $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that were supposed to expire, this budget will cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with the vast majority of those cuts going to the top 1%—thus the real increase in the deficit is a staggering $5.3 trillion over 10 years. This is absolutely not what we need, given that unemployment is actually pretty good right now and we still have a deficit of $1.8 trillion per year. (Yes, really.) That kind of deficit is good in response to a severe recession—I was all in favor of it during COVID, and it worked. But when the economy is good, you’re supposed to balance the budget, and they haven’t.

The richest 1% stand to gain about 4% more income from these tax cuts (which adds up to about $240 billion per year), while the combination of tax cuts and spending cuts would most likely reduce the income of 40% of the population.

They aren’t even cutting spending to offset these tax cuts. This budget only includes a paltry $4 billion in spending cuts—less than 0.1% of the budget. (I mean, sure, $4 billion is a lot of money for a person; but for a whole country as rich and large as ours? It’s a rounding error.) And then it includes $521 billion in spending increases, over 100 times as much.

They are talking about making more cuts, but they’ve been cagey as to where, probably because the only plausible ways to save this much money are the military, Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security. Obviously Republicans will never cut the military, but the other three programs are also enormously popular, even in deep-red states. It would be not only very harmful to millions of people to cut these programs—it would also be harmful to the Republicans’ re-election chances. They could also get some savings by cutting income security programs like SNAP and TANF, which would probably be less unpopular—but it would also cause enormous suffering.

This new budget is estimated to add some $6.9 trillion to the national debt over 10 years—and even more after that, if the policies actually continue.

I am not exactly a “deficit hawk”; I don’t think the budget should always be balanced. But this is not the time to be increasing the deficit. When times are good, we should balance the budget, so that when we have to go into debt during bad times, we can afford to do so.

And bad times are probably on the horizon, since Trump’s tariff policy is already such a disaster. So are we going to borrow even more then? While bond yields are rising? We’re going to end up spending most of our budget on debt payments! And all this injection of money into the system won’t be good for inflation either (and on top of the tariffs!).

The only sensible thing to do right now is raise taxes on the rich. We need that revenue. We can’t just keep going deeper into debt. And the rich are the ones who would be least harmed by raising taxes—indeed, if you focused the hikes on billionaires, they would barely feel anything at all.

But the Republicans don’t care about what’s in the interest of ordinary Americans. They only care about the interests of the rich. And that’s why they passed this budget.