Numbers don't lie, but if you fire the messenger, then the problem never happened, right? Last evening on Truth Social, Trump wrote, "America is very rich again, and stronger than ever before. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" and of course, that's a lie.
In a letter to Senate ranking member Jeff Merkley, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that Trump's Big Beautiful Bill Act would add $5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade if its temporary tax relief provisions are extended for a full 10 years.
The Hill reports:
The CBO estimates that as a result, the total amount of federal debt held by the public would increase by 11.5 percentage points by the end of 2034.
“Each and every analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office continues to show the same result regardless of how you look at it: this bill explodes the debt by trillions of dollars to fund tax breaks for billionaires,” Merkley said in a statement.
“It is the height of hypocrisy coming from the party that claims to be fiscally responsible,” he said.
Via Politico:
That increase could affect investors and regular people getting loans for a range of assets, from cars to homes. But it will also hike costs for the federal government in a real way, according to the budget office — increasing interest payments on the nearly $37 trillion national debt by $718 billion over a decade.
That’s higher than the $440 billion in extra borrowing costs CBO estimated in June, before Republicans reworked many of the bill’s policies to abide by Senate rules and woo the support of GOP lawmakers who were reluctant to vote in favor of the final product....
The Joint Committee on Taxation has predicted that, if Congress eventually makes these temporary tax policies permanent, it would add $800 billion to the deficit over a decade. At this point, CBO predicts, the bill would increase the cost of servicing the national debt by $789 billion over 10 years, hiking the legislation’s price tag to $5 trillion.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has previously criticized the CBO. This year, in fact! The director of the nonpartisan CBO, Philip Swagel, served in the Bush administration, and yet, in May, Johnson said, "They are historically, totally unreliable. It's run by Democrats.. This is going to be deficit reducing." Expect some more lie-filled attacks on the CBO now.
Imagine what this country could do for everyday people with $4 trillion. Like, for example, healthcare. A study by Yale epidemiologists found that Medicare for All would save around 68,000 lives per year while reducing U.S. healthcare spending by approximately 13%, or $450 billion annually. Or infrastructure, daycare for new parents, assistance for unhoused veterans, eliminating student debt, and helping those with food insecurity.
But we wouldn't want billionaires to go hungry, right?
