(AFP) – US senators have begun weeks of what is certain to be fierce debate over the mammoth policy package President Donald Trump hopes will seal his legacy, headlined by tax cuts slated to add up to $3 trillion to the nation’s debt. The Republican leader celebrated when the House passed his “big, beautiful bill,” which partially covers an extension of his 2017 tax relief through budget cuts projected to strip health care from millions of low-income Americans. The Senate now gets to make its own changes, and the upper chamber’s version could make or break Republicans’ 2026 midterm election prospects — and define Trump’s second term.
But the 1,116-page blueprint faces an uphill climb, with moderate Republicans balking at $1.5 trillion in spending cuts while fiscal hawks are blasting the bill as a ticking debt bomb. “We have enough (holdouts) to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Senator Ron Johnson, one of half a dozen Republican opponents to the bill, told CNN. Democrats — whose support is not required if Republicans can maintain a united front — have focused on the tax cuts mostly benefiting the rich on the backs of a working class already struggling with high prices. The White House says the legislation will spur robust economic growth to neutralize its potential to blow up America’s already burgeoning debt pile, which has ballooned to $36.9 trillion.
But several independent analyses have found that — even taking growth into account — it will add between $2.5 trillion and $3.1 trillion to deficits over the next decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, found that the combined effects of tax cuts and cost savings would be a giant transfer of wealth from the poorest 10 percent to the richest 10 percent. Republicans muscled the measure through the House by a single vote on May 22 by a combination of bargaining vote holdouts on policies and deploying Trump himself to twist arms. House Speaker Mike Johnson is now pleading with the Senate not to alter the bill too much, as any tweaks will need to go back to the lower chamber.
– Faultlines –
The Senate wants to get the bill to Trump’s desk by US Independence Day on July 4 — an ambitious timeline given Republicans’ narrow three-vote majority and wide faultlines that have opened over the proposed specifics. Independent analysts expect around seven million beneficiaries of the Medicaid health insurance program will be deprived of coverage due to new proposed eligibility restrictions and work requirements. Polling shows that the vast majority of Americans oppose cutting Medicaid — including Trump himself, as well as some Republicans in poorer states that rely heavily on federal welfare. Senate moderates are also worried about proposed changes to funding food aid that could deprive up to 3.2 million of vital nutrition support.
One thing is almost certain — Trump himself will get involved at some point, though his negotiation tactics may be more subtle than they were when he threatened “grandstanders” holding up the tax bill in the House. Trump took to his Truth Social website on Monday to decry “so many false statements (that) are being made about ‘THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL'” — and to falsely claim that it would not cut Medicaid. “The only ‘cutting’ we will do is for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, something that should have been done by the Incompetent, Radical Left Democrats for the last four years, but wasn’t,” he said. One more wrinkle for Trump: tech billionaire Elon Musk — no longer one of his closest aides but still an influential commentator — has already broken with the president to criticize the mega-bill. “A bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk said in a CBS interview criticizing its effect on debt.
– Frankie TAGGART
© 2024 AFP
