CBO: Big Beautiful Blowies For Billionaires Bill Bigly Blows Up Budget Beficit!

What? Er, deficit. Also, American Anti-Asinine Alliteration Act will alleviate our agita.

Befuddled bowtied bun-bun. Photo by Chan Swan on Unsplash

The Congressional Budget Office yesterday released its scoring of the version of Donald Trump’s stupid budget bill that passed the House, and the takeaways are that the richest Americans will get huge tax cuts, Medicaid and other safety net programs will be gutted, and budget deficits will explode by $2.4 trillion dollars over the next decade. Republicans now plan to jam the bill through the Senate by ignoring the report, saying it’s wrong, and generally lying about the bill, insisting it will help ordinary folks and the only people who’ll lose healthcare coverage are lazy cheaters who have it coming.

Republicans are already on the lie train; Senate Majority Leader John “You forgot it’s not Mitch McConnell” Thune claimed the CBO numbers were “flat wrong” because the tax cuts will miraculously cause so much economic growth that they’ll bring in much more revenue, just like he says the 2017 tax cuts did, although that too is a lie. The AP very politely and inaccurately didn’t say Thune was lying; it just pointed out that the higher revenues he referred to, “$1.5 trillion, or 5.6% greater than predicted,” were mostly due to the “burst of high inflation” following the pandemic, according to a CBO report last year.

But not even Thune could match the dishonesty of White House Budget Director Russ Vought, who insisted that if you don’t count the cost of keeping the 2017 tax cuts in place — around $4.5 trillion — then the new bill magically doesn’t add anything to the deficit, because it simply extends “current policy.” Also, if you think in similar terms about the night of April 14, 1865, you merely have to extend the status quo of 10:10 PM to conclude that Mary Todd Lincoln had a very nice time at the theater.

The bill would cut taxes by about $3.75 trillion by extending the 2017 Big Fat Tax Cuts for Rich Fuckwads that would otherwise expire, and by adding — temporarily — some of the idiot extra cuts Trump ran on, like removing taxes on tips and overtime. It would sharply increase military spending and funding for Trump’s mass deportation schemes, which Republicans agree need to be much more cruel.

To help offset the tax cuts and higher spending on deporting people, the bill sticks it to lower-income people, including many of the working-class voters who elected Trump to make their lives better by sticking it to immigrants. The bill will chop out around $1.3 trillion in spending, with the biggest chunk of that coming in cuts to Medicaid, which will total nearly $800 billion in cuts over a decade. The bill also cuts food assistance to low-income people and eliminates improvements that Joe Biden’s administration made to Obamacare, because billionaires need the money.

Between the Medicaid cuts and the changes to the Affordable Care Act, the CBO estimates that by 2034, nearly 11 million fewer Americans will have healthcare coverage than they do now. But that’s only from the House bill, and doesn’t include separate HHS rule changes to the ACA that will drop 5 million people from Obamacare, bringing the total uninsured number to 16 million over a decade.

The biggest chunk of cuts to Medicaid would come from the imposition of work requirements, which, because they’re so cumbersome, drive people off the rolls even if they’re working, as most people receiving Medicaid are.

Other cuts to Medicaid will come from rescinding Biden-era rules that made it easier for people to qualify for and renew their coverage, plus other technical changes that only policy wonks pay attention to but which will ratchet down the number of people who qualify for Medicaid, like “increasing the frequency of eligibility redeterminations for the ACA expansion group.” Hey, the Trump shitshow is so loud and constantly changing that nobody on the nightly news is going to get into the weeds and explain that.

As for the changes to Obamacare, the Brookings Institution makes the case that this bill is pretty much as bad as the outright repeal of the ACA that John McCain gave a thumbs-down to in 2017 — and that “along key dimensions, CBO projects the 2025 bill to have a larger impact” than that other abomination, mostly thanks to the huge cuts to Medicaid. After all, even though the 2017 repeal bill would have eliminated the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, it left the rest of Medicaid alone.

But it’s not just the Medicaid fuckery; the House bill introduces a lot of new paperwork — supposedly to prevent “fraud,” which is already rare — that will have the effect of making sure enrollments in the ACA marketplace decline, as well as requiring that people re-enroll every year instead of letting their existing ACA plan continue as long as neither their income nor the plan itself has changed.

Other little changes would eliminate eligibility for some immigrants who are here with legal status, like a long-term visa, but not yet permanent residents. It would also kick people trying to resolve paperwork problems off their coverage until the problem is resolved, instead of letting them have provisional coverage — and that’s only likely to increase as the new paperwork requirements kick in.

And of course it will make the marketplace plans themselves less affordable so people drop their coverage altogether. That's on top of the new HHS rules, and on top of allowing Biden’s expanded premium subsidies to expire altogether. Taken together, CBO estimates that all the changes will reduce Obamacare enrollments by a third.

And remember, we need to include all those cuts when you talk about this shit: It’s not just the 11 million people who’ll lose coverage due to the bill, it’s the additional 5 million who’ll lose Obamacare thanks to the expiring Biden improvements and HHS rule changes.

Also not getting nearly enough attention because the Medicaid cuts are what most people are (justifiably) screaming about, there are the cuts to food assistance that will increase hunger and, as a result, will make poor kids less able to learn in school. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that more than 2 million kids in low-income households would lose some or all of their food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Some states could actually get rid of SNAP altogether.

The House Republican plan would cut SNAP, the nation’s most important and effective anti-hunger program, by roughly 30 percent. As a share of the program, the cut would be about twice the size of the deep cuts to food assistance enacted in 1996. And these extreme cuts are deeper than the $230 billion in cuts the budget resolution called for because the bill adds tens of billions of dollars in new spending for farm programs, paid for by taking more food assistance away from people with low incomes.

It’s just very very simple: Billionaires and the richest Americans will make out like bandits, and the folks they’re stealing from are poor kids.

We’re sure the bill still doesn’t impose enough suffering to please Republicans, so we won’t be surprised if future additions include new work requirements for people when they’re hospitalized, with severe penalties for those in full body casts who won’t change bedpans, plus possibly a requirement that kids whose families somehow still qualify for SNAP be forced to wear a distinctive “WE GET FOOD STAMPS” T-shirt whenever they’re in public.

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[CBO / AP / CBS News / CNBC / KFF / Brookings Institution / CBPP]

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