Here we go again. This week, the Senate unveiled, honed, and passed its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it’s a fiscal monstrosity. What was already an oversized mess in the House has been supersized into a $4 trillion ode to unseriousness.
This isn’t tax reform. It’s a bipartisan piñata stuffed with pork, gimmicks, and—of course—debt. We’re told to cheer because the bill makes permanent a few pro-growth policies, including 100 percent bonus depreciation and research and development expensing. However, a few pearls in a vast ocean of bad policies are nothing to celebrate. It’s like marveling at newly painted rooms in a burning house.
We’ve been told to cheer because the bill removes or trims $147 billion of the House version’s worst handouts. But as an Arnold Ventures analysis points out, the Senate also added $186 billion to the pot. That’s a net increase of $39 billion in pork.
This is what Washington calls compromise: The House proposes $1, the Senate proposes $2, and somehow, we end up spending $3. Congress is managing both to break the bank and violate its own budget rules.
With $3.2 trillion in direct costs and $700 billion in interest payments, the budget proposal would bring total new borrowing to $3.9 trillion, according to a past analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Former President Joe Biden took four years to add $4.7 trillion to the deficit.
Don’t overlook the cynicism baked into this bill. It hikes the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction (long known as a boon to the wealthy) to $40,000 (with a “phase-out” in 2029 that no one believes will happen). There are hundreds of billions in “temporary” provisions that everyone knows will be extended. There’s a deficit impact so large that even the rosiest dynamic scores can’t make the numbers add up.
This bill also blatantly violates the House’s own instructions for budget reconciliation, which recommend $2 trillion in spending offsets. The House version fell somewhat short, pairing $3.8 trillion in tax relief with $1.6 trillion in cuts. The Senate version? Nearly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and only $1.4 trillion in spending reductions—a $600 billion breach of a deal legislators supposedly agreed to.
Republicans once talked seriously about aligning taxes and spending. They cared about economic distortion, simplicity, and broadening the tax base. Now, too many just want the sugar rush of tax cuts without fiscal discipline. Meanwhile, Democrats want to vastly expand the state and pretend that billionaires alone can foot the bill. Both sides are wrong. The math doesn’t work, and the morality of the reckless spending is worse.
