The GOP’s Budget Hawks Will Bankrupt the Country

The four rebels are all members of the House Freedom Caucus. Roy is its policy chair. The Freedom Caucus was founded in 2015 largely (but not exclusively) to push mainstream Republicans harder to balance the federal budget. After the budget bill advanced Sunday night, the caucus’s board complained in a statement posted on Twitter that the budget bill “continues increased deficits in the near term with possible savings years down the road that may never materialize” and fails to “lead our nation towards a balanced budget.”

No argument there. The House budget bill, comically titled “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill” (text; section-by-section summary), is a piece of legislation no honest fiscal conservative can support. Its tax provisions would, over 10 years, cost $4.6 trillion, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. The bill’s offsetting spending cuts—mostly decimating Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides health care to lower-income people—would save $1.3 trillion. The net effect would more than double the current budget deficit ($1.9 trillion) to $5.1 trillion.

Let us note, class, that the cost of the tax cut is more than three times the savings from spending cuts. As a matter of simple arithmetic, a fiscal conservative should be more interested in the $4.6 trillion figure than in the $1.3 trillion figure. As Willie Sutton would say, $4.6 trillion is where the money is.