Welp, in the dead of Sunday night, House Republicans pushed their One Big Beautiful Bill Act out of committee. It’s literally called that, and because everything with Republicans is opposite day, it’s ugly. Unless you enjoy food taken out of poor children’s mouths!

The Republicans are so proud of the bill that the Rules Committee debate on it is scheduled for 1 a.m. next Wednesday morning, with a hope that it can be quickly crammed through the House on Thursday. The vote to get it out of committee was 16 Democrats against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and four Freedom Caucus deficit-hawk Republicans voting “present” after a 26-hour marathon markup session, because complaining that a spending bill is not cruel enough to sick people and hungry children is a time-honored tradition among their people.

The final bill is pretty much in line with what we’ve been hearing about, and here’s all 1,116 pages of it, if you’re a speed-reader/glutton for punishment. Or the Washington Post has an excellent breakdown, here is a link.

Big Beautiful Blowies For Billionaires Budget Bill Not Kicking Poors Hard Enough, Somebody Should Fix That!

Doktor Zoom

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May 17

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Summary: oh boy does this fuck over working people in favor of fat cats! Did you expect anything less? And it does it in a slow-screw kind of way, with the goodies up front and the piper-paying phased in later.

Just check out this chart Judd Legum put together over at Popular Information from the Penn Wharton model. The more you make, the more you’ll save, but if you make under $51,000, you’ll be getting screwed. Though if you make more than $4.3 million, it’s a bonanza! He notes:

The Penn Wharton Budget Model finds that people who make less than $51,000 will see their after-tax income decrease if Trump's "big, beautiful bill" becomes law. Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent will see their income increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 2026, for example, the bottom quintile of earners ($17,000 or less) will see their after-tax income go down by $1,035. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% ($4.3 million or more) will see their after-tax income go up by $389,280.

Swell! One-third of the country makes less than $51k.

The rich getting their 2017 tax cuts extended is the biggest deficit-maker in there, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this back-scratching for them will balloon the deficit by at least $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years. It’s so weird how Republicans only worry about deficits when a Democrat is in charge.

The four deficit hawks who voted “present” are mad that most of the cuts will come later, like a ticking time bomb. But not everybody is in a safe district for midterms, Chip. There’s social safety net cuts and work requirements for Medicaid, and cuts to green energy subsidies, but they don’t kick in until 2029, after Trump will either be gone or be president for life.

Moody’s does not like this, and cut the US’s credit rating for the first time since 1917, noting that the ballooning debt will “add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

The bill will increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion by increasing the standard deduction, by up to $2,000 for married couples filing jointly and $1,000 for single filers, to $32,000 for couples and $16,000 for individuals.

It also it spends $140 billion on the border, and the immigration crackdown. There’s $17.4 billion for MAGA savings accounts for newborns, though the bill does not actually give parents of newborns any money, it just lets parents put $5,000 a year tax-free in a savings account for a child’s education, a small business loan, or a house.

It would take away health coverage and leave at least 8.6 million people uninsured, cutting at least $715 billion in health care spending, mostly from Medicaid, by taking money away from states that fund services at clinics that also perform abortions, like Planned Parenthood. It would also cut the federal matching rate for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion in 14 states and District of Columbia because they fund, entirely with their own state funds, health coverage programs for undocumented people.

It takes food away from children; children with undocumented-immigrant parents will be ineligible for nutrition programs. And it raises income eligibility for programs, imposing new costs like co-pays on families of four making as little as $35,365.

There’s more! It slashes billions in housing subsidies, and from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

And it taxes universities! While also repealing Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness. And it gives tax breaks to homeschoolers and a 100-percent deduction, a dollar-for-dollar credit, for private school.

It does cut the tax on tips and overtime, but only until 2028.

Meanwhile the phase-in will slowly squeeze the poor even more, and by 2030, those in the bottom quintile will see their after-tax income reduced by $1,405.

And that is not even getting into how the regressive tax of tariffs are going to make anything with an imported anything, which is just about everything, more expensive, in the very near future.

GOP leaders can only lose two votes on the House floor if all lawmakers are present and voting, so look for the timeline of cutting Medicaid benefits and green energy tax credits to speed up to appease them!

These people are just the worst, what else can we say?

[Heather Cox Richardson / Washington Post / NBC / CNBC]

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