Supporters of the Budget Bill Must be Held Accountable

Should this monstrosity pass, the fight isn't over. It must then enter its equally important second phase.

Readers know that I’ve been one among many waging war against the big, ugly budget bill. You know, the one that:

—represents the largest transfer of resources from the poor to the rich in our history;

—cuts Medicaid, Medicare, and food support to the poor to partially offset tax cuts for the wealthy;

—puts the deficit on an unsustainable path that is likely to raise interest rates, including on home and auto loans;

—is deeply unpopular with voters of all stripes, such that the more they learn about it, the further underwater it sinks;

—has a huge opportunity-cost price tag: by squandering so many resources on cutting taxes disproportionately for the wealthy, it will be that much harder to find fiscal space to address the affordability crisis stalking the middle-class and poor.

Until the bill passes, we must elevate all of the above every chance we get. There is internal Republican dissent on many of the above issues, in no small part because some of these members recognize how much the cuts will hurt their constituents.

But for them and the rest, doing their donors bidding is a powerful force, and with Rs in control of the White House, Senate, and House, and with the reconciliation process in play (meaning the Senate can pass the bill without and Ds), the bill has momentum.

Therefore, it is VERY important to hold these politicians responsible for the pain they will cause should the bill pass, the deficits they will generate for no good reason, and the maldistribution of resources they will exacerbate.

This means collecting their claims that the bill will more than pay for itself, including this from yesterday. What’s relevant in that document is not just its massive outlier claims relative to non-partisan analysts (see here for a great comparison). It’s that, as both Brendan Duke and Jason Furman pointed out, they’re wrong starting now, claiming highly improbable deficit reduction starting this fiscal year! Typically, when admin’s are trying to push impossibly optimistic economic outcomes, they avoid near-term accountability by doing so far in the future.

It means tracking Medicaid and SNAP recipients who will hurt by the cuts, both in terms of coverage and costs, tracking pressure on government debt service and interest rates from all the Treasury bonds they’ll have to sell to finance the deal, tracking the impact on rural hospitals (again, a live issue for many red-state voters), tracking the upward pressure on energy costs, tracking the demise of job-creating clean energy projects cancelled to partially offset the costs of the tax cut. And much more.

So, continue to fight the bill’s momentum with all you’ve got, but at the same time, get your basslines baselines ready, listen carefully to what’s being promised, and be ready to hold the perpetrators of this huge and highly consequential mistake for their actions. Because if actions don’t have consequences, our politics will never improve.