Congress is closer to passing a massive tax and spending package that Republican leaders tout as a win for American families.
It’s spin and deceit.
The so-called Trump Big Beautiful Bill is a $4.5 trillion infusion to wealthy Americans that will widen the wealth gap, hollow out essential safety nets, and hike the existing mortgage on the nation’s future, all while throwing relative crumbs to working people in Colorado and across the country.
The bill is a transparent Trojan horse for permanent tax cuts to the wealthy, padded with gimmicks and draconian cuts to programs that millions of Americans depend on.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, wealthiest households would gain an average of $12,000 per year under the plan. Meanwhile, the poorest Americans would lose a net $1,600 annually.
Colorado Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper made it clear in his comments on the measure after it passed the Senate by one vote: “It’s outright cruel.”
For middle-income Americans, the average tax benefit would amount to a whopping $500 to $1,500 a year. The amount is nothing compared to the still-painful damage caused by inflated prices for nearly everything against wages that, for most working-class Americans, have never kept up.
In return for token tax breaks, Americans are expected to accept massive cuts to Medicaid and food assistance — programs that serve 111 million people. Among the most cruel provisions are new 80-hour-per-month work requirements for recipients, including older adults and parents of teens. These changes would leave nearly 12 million more people uninsured and kick 3 million off food stamps.
And while working families are squeezed, businesses will enjoy a virtual buffet of tax breaks, from immediate deductions for equipment and research to permanent rate cuts.
America has been here before with equally dismal results. This is nothing more than the same old “trickle-down” policies that never, ever delivered for average Americans.
Even for those Colorado residents who are indifferent to the fate of the state’s poorest, struggling residents and what will happen to them when they’re shut out of Medicaid coverage, the deep and senseless cuts to the critical program will result in so much worse for so many.
Medicaid is far more than the last resort to healthcare for working single mothers and poor children. In Colorado, tens of thousands of elderly people, who worked hard their entire lives, depend on Medicaid for nursing home care. In many cases, they depleted their savings, sold their homes and cars to qualify for Medicaid to help pay for assisted living care that easily costs more than $120,000 a year. Without Medicaid, these vulnerable residents face homelessness.
Likewise, all residents across the state’s most conservative, rural communities face losing what little hospital and clinic care they have. Those facilities cannot exist without Medicaid recipients choosing close-to-home care over a trip to one of Colorado’s larger cities.
For that and other bill “highlights,” Aurora Democratic Congressperson Jason Crow called it the “worst bill” he’s seen since he joined Congress.
While Republicans tout the bill as a way to national fiscal prudence, it’s more than 900 pages of boondoggle pork spending.
Nearly $350 billion would be poured into mass deportation operations, border wall construction, and the militarization of immigration enforcement. It includes hiring 10,000 new ICE officers and mass detention funding.
And, clearly, the Trump administration’s effort to deport millions of immigrants is nothing but Trump cosplay, dramatics and rhetoric. Despite that, the impact of this bill doesn’t even account for the disaster inflicted on the American economy if the billions poured into mass deportation actually worked.
Other boondoggles include vanity projects such as $40 million for Trump’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes,” a new children’s savings account branded “Trump Accounts,” and the elimination of taxes on gun silencers and short-barreled rifles.
More political theater disguised as policy.
And the worst part of this disastrous bill? The real cost.
Republicans claim the package won’t raise the deficit — but only if you don’t do the math. The independent CBO puts the real price tag at $3.3 trillion added to the deficit over the next decade. GOP lawmakers are simply ignoring this reality, using accounting tricks that would “make Enron executives blush,” in the words of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
This bill is not a serious attempt to govern. It is a campaign document, stuffed with political wish-list items, reckless cuts, and tax favors for the rich. The problem for Republicans backing this boondoggle will be the very politics they’re pandering to. Once responsible rural and conservative Americans see the damage this bill has caused, the next congressional election will result in a tsunami of candidates who promise to try and reverse all the damage.
We agree with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis in his assessment of the quagmire.
“Republicans in the Senate voted to kick Americans off health care, raise costs on insurance, kill jobs, increase our deficit and debt, and make it harder for kids to access food,” Polis said. “This shameful vote comes at the expense of hardworking Coloradans. This bill is bad for our communities, bad for our economy, and will increase the deficit and balloon our national debt.”
Like most clear-thinking Colorado residents, we appeal to the state’s four Republican members to kill this bill now that it has returned to the House for the sake of their constituents, as well as their own congressional tenure.
This editorial is filled with half-truths, misrepresentations, falsehoods and outright lies. Anyone who believes anything coming from the Aurora Sentinel Editorial Board is a willing fool.
Well, gee, Kirk, where are your facts?
I took your challenge, Jeff Ryan, and reviewed the entire editorial finding “half-truths, misrepresentations, falsehoods and outright lies” in almost every paragraph. But, I don’t want to be long winded about this going into the entire editorial.
So Jeff, just start with the sentence under the title. “This is a campaign document.” Outright lie. This is a bill passed by the Senate. Not good yet?
Try the second short paragraph. “It’s spin and deceit.” At best this is a misrepresentation and deceitful in itself. Our US Senate majority didn’t believe this.
It goes on and on.
That’s all you got?
Man, are you lame.
But I’ll mark this day, the day you proved you have NO problem with blowing up the budget deficit so the wealthiest Americans can avoid paying their fair share and instead rip off the people of this country and hand even more billions to people who are obscenely wealthy as it is.
Well, Jeff, I’m old, so many days I’m lame. Spiritually, physically and intellectually. But not this day. I am a patriot and see the big picture and it appears that you have not a clue about economics, taxes or the importance of entrepreneurial billionaires to our society and the good old USA.
As a side note, I’ve noticed in the past, like now, that you are not very well addressed in insulting commenters. You know, similar to a poor uneducated 15 year old.
That’s all I got.
On this bill … Trump told the House Republicans the bill shouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security.
* “The Senate-passed version carves a little over $1 trillion out of Medicaid—part of a $1.2 trillion package of safety-net cuts that could deprive roughly 11 million people of coverage, the Congressional Budget Office says”
* impacts on Medicare and Social Security are indirect … but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analysis says “the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) would accelerate Social Security and Medicare insolvency by a year, to 2032…. Upon insolvency in 2032, we estimate that Social Security beneficiaries would face an across-the-board benefit cut of around 24 percent – even deeper than the cuts scheduled under current law. HI payments, meanwhile, would be cut by 11 percent.
* there would be mandatory sequestration resulting in Medicare funding cuts. KFF, a health news source, says “if the reconciliation bill is enacted into law in its current form, and Congress takes no further action, the increase in the deficit would trigger mandatory cuts, also known as sequestration, under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010. These cuts would total approximately $500 billion to Medicare over 2026–2034, according to CBO, based on an increase in the deficit of $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The required spending cuts to Medicare could be larger based on the Senate-passed bill, which is estimated to increase the deficit by $3.4 trillion over 10 years.”
All of the savings in this bill are eclipsed by the extension of the 2017 tax cuts and the additional tax cuts, so federal deficits will go up immediately and the federal debt will swell.