Trump’s Big Bill the ‘Most Expensive’ Since the 1960s Warns Conservative Think Tank Wonk
(Evan Vucci/AP photo)
President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill, known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed the House on Thursday and is all but guaranteed to become law, despite many of Washington’s most conservative think tanks publicly sounding the alarm on both its impact on the national debt.
Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told the New York Times this week that the bill would be the “most expensive piece of legislation probably since the 1960s.”
“The danger is that Congress is piling trillions of new borrowing on top of deficits that are already leaping,” she added. Riedl also warned against the bill’s departure from conservative law-making in a scathing article in The Dispatch titled, “Tax Bill Highlights the Collapse of GOP Policymaking.”
In the article she argued that the notion that bill somehow will pay for its spending increases and revenue cuts by spurring economic growth is “dubious.”
She added that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) offered Republicans a “reality check’ that simply chose to ignore, writing:
Rather than address the bill’s extraordinary cost, Republicans responded by attacking the CBO. They challenged the agency’s historical accuracy by claiming that it failed to competently score the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)–even as CBO’s subsequent revenue estimate achieved 99.5 percent accuracy up until the pandemic. President Donald Trump accused the CBO of being run by Democrats even though its director is a Republican.
Sen. Tim Scott produced a video claiming that CBO also erroneously scored tax cuts in the 1930s and 1960s—which is impossible because CBO did not exist until 1974, not to mention that those 1930s tax cuts actually took place in the 1920s. All because the CBO refused to pretend that the House Republican tax bill would pay for itself or even offset a portion of the cost.
Jeff Stein, the chief economics reporter for The Washington Post, shared an analysis from the CATO Institute that found the bill adds a shocking $6 trillion to the debt – higher than the widely understood $3 to 4 trillion in 10 years. Stein marveled at the finding and wrote, “Honestly, a bit surprising to me how much of Washington’s conservative establishment — Cato, Tax Foundation, AEI, Manhattan Institute — has been strongly & publicly critical of the legislation.”
The libertarian leaning CATO Institute put out a press release hours ahead of the bill passing and summed up the findings by Dominik Lett, noting, “As written, the Senate’s version of the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ will add nearly $4 trillion to the debt. But under realistic assumptions about economic growth, congressional extensions of tax giveaways or delays to spending reform, and the fiscal impact of mass deportations, the bill’s cost could soar past $6 trillion.”
