Several times today, you will find detailed content on some of the significant issues with New Hampshire’s One Big Beautiful Bill (or not so much), HB2. It’s got some good, bad, and ugly, and we’ve covered some of that here and here, and while there’s a lot of good, and we need to take the points we can get, we can’t lose sight of the bad stuff they embraced to get it across the finish line.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) was no different; while we’ll be digging up compromises for a while, it did what it had to do. It prevented a massive tax increase that would have wrecked the economy on the cusp of the mid-terms. This is a yuge economic and political win.
The Democrats didn’t vote against it because of “cuts” to anything except taxes. They needed your day-to-day fiscal life in tatters so they could milk that to win elections in the midterms. Huge tax increases they wanted were stopped, but had they expired, the damage would have become a narrative mule for why Trump and Republicans are bad.
They have to settle for a different mule, and it won’t matter much if the economy continues to rebound.
Make no mistake, the OBBB has issues, but it was our only hope for resolving the issue of tax cuts expiring, and it is worth noting that it was done in record time. Those tax cuts are permanent, now, as is a list of other economic improvements. This is the White House Press Office copy, for the record.
- The largest tax cut in history for middle- and working-class Americans
- According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax bill will most benefit workers and families making less than $50,000 per year.
- Bigger paychecks of $10,000+ more in annual take-home pay for families.
- NO tax on Tips.
- NO tax on Overtime.
- NO tax on Social Security.
- A $12.5 billion modernization of our air traffic control system.
- Permanently increasing the Child Tax Credit for more than 40 million families.
- Permanently securing our borders by finishing the border wall and hiring thousands of new ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.
- Driving down energy costs with a massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production capacity.
- A tax deduction on Made in America auto loan interest.
- Protection for two million family farms from punitive double taxation.
- Creating Trump Investment Accounts for every American newborn.
- Restoring fiscal sanity by cutting $1.5 trillion in spending.
- Strengthening Medicaid by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse and blocking illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid.
- Funding the Golden Dome missile defense system to confront 21st-century threats.
- Modernizing our military to ensure that it has the resources to be a ready, lethal fighting force after four years of Biden-era weakness.
Economic growth will be necessary to achieve the projected savings (spending cuts), but the potential to reduce the federal debt is very real. We also need Congress to advance more than one precision bill to secure other reductions in government spending, as the Trump Administration peels back layers of the deep state onion. But much has been done in a few short months.
I’m also reminded that the experts, even on our side, have consistently failed to accurately predict what Trump’s policies would do. There’s still time for failure, but the sky is falling class of armchair economists is baffled by how tariff policy and other international trade strongarming have yet to deliver the promised downturn.
I couldn’t tell you why either, but this isn’t our first rodeo. Trump 1.0 created growth and success across every demographic to the surprise and often disdain of those who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the thug from Queens who became “king.”
We’ll try to dissect the details of the OBBB as we go, combating the political left’s misinformation and disinformation campaigns that try to tell a different story. You can see my first swing at that here, on my Substack, where I expose the Medicaid Cuts lie. It’s paywalled, but the free part sets the stage for what follows, and you are encouraged to subscribe or at least follow – most of the content there is free.
As for budgets and stuff and junk, when Congress comes back from vacation, they need to consider the federal budget, continuing resolutions, blaming each other for wanting to shut down the government, and the rest of it.
Never a dull moment.
But a dull moment would be nice.
