Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill.
But the center of the bill is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trumpâs 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations.
Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill. Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts.
Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be âthe biggest cut in the programâs history,â Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.
Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034.
Tobias Burns of The Hill summed it up: âRepublicansâ tax-and-spending cut bill will take from the poor and give to the rich, Congressâs official scoring body has found.â
Tonight, after 22 hours of debate and after a set of amendments made steeper cuts to Medicaid to woo far-right Republicans, the House Rules Committee agreed to move the bill forward to the House itself. There, Republican leadership intends to push it through as quickly as possible, originally hoping to have the vote over by 6:00 Thursday morning. In 2025 the Republicansâ signature bill redistributes wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Knowing the provisions in the bill will be enormously unpopular, the Republicans have been jamming it through, often in the middle of the night, as quickly as they could.
Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that wrote Venezuela assessment The firings took place a week after the ODNI released a partially declassified intelligence assessment, dated April 7 and produced by the National Intelligence Council, that found that the Venezuelan government is most likely not directing the activities of the gang known as Tren de Aragua, or facilitating its operations in the United States.
Whether you think this moment is continuous with our past, or a break from it, one thing we can say for sure is that conservative support for this type of governance is not an aberration. It belongs to a consistent pattern of enthusiastic support for tyrants and would-be tyrants. This is who they are, this is what theyâve been and, whenever the age of Trump passes, this is who theyâll be. What it should signal to observers of American politics is that there wonât be a time when either the conservative movement or the Republican Party truly changes course.
from bsky - Sorry to sound Woke but I donât think the feds should be bragging on live tv about their abilities to disappear an elected public official, for fun
Paul Krugman - So let me get this straight: masks are bad and un-American if worn to fight a pandemic, but good if worn by people claiming to be government agents when they kidnap people off the street
