Posted on 05/26/2025 4:33:40 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller addressed false claims that are circulating about the One Big Beautiful Bill.
The first claim he tackled is that the legislation doesn’t “codify the [Department of Government Efficiency] cuts.”
“A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to ‘mandatory’ spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps,” he wrote on X. “The senate rules prevent it from cutting ‘discretionary’ spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.”
Next, Miller discussed claims that the bill increases the deficit—a sticking point for some GOP lawmakers.
“This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick,” he said. “Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.”
Miller then turned to “another fantastically false claim” that the One Big Beautiful Bill spends trillions of dollars.
“This is just completely invented out of whole cloth,” he said. “This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t ‘fund’ almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply...”
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Rand Paul, are you listening????
If Miller’s words could come out of Trump’s, Johnson’s, and Leavitt’s mouths, they’d be unstoppable.
Just balance the damn budget!!! Quit obfuscating everything beyond understanding. Stop baseline budgeting. The department of educating is discretionary? The legal services corporation is mandatory? Midnight basketball, NPR, PBS—mandatory or discretionary? Stop the BULLCRAP and balance the damn budget!!!
Stop spending us into oblivion!!!! Stop the nonsense.
“This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick,” he said. “Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.”
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This is legitimate.
But.
The current deficit is $1.8T and that will add to the debt at 3.4% interest — and rising.
About 60-100B additional spending per year over the 10 yrs in question. So pure math quotes of about $450B diff per year are not really pure for the entire array of govt liability.
The media reports have been saying House = $4T increase in deficit over 10 yrs. And $2T for the Senate’s plan. It is indeed possible these numbers are being evaluated over tax cut expiration assumptions, in which case the media has it wrong. We’re going to need to see analysis from Rand and Massie. There may be more to this, but in this restricted context, it’s not a horrible deficit increase.
GPT concurs with Miller btw, about $400B difference in revenue if the tax cuts are kept in place rather than expire. GPT also notes that this does NOT apply to the corporate tax cuts of 2017, which were made permanent at that time.
i thought this was interesting, yet - if correct - it’s not the general impression i get from comments on FR:
25 May: WattsUpWithThat: The “Big Beautiful Bill” — Climate And Energy Provisions
From THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN by Francis Menton
Somewhat to my surprise, the BBB as passed by the House appears to repeal and rescind essentially all of the green energy handouts from the IRA. The IRA had added a collection of new sections to the Clean Air Act to create various massive funds for handouts to “greenhouse gas reduction” efforts. Go to section 42101 et seq. of the BBB (you will need to scroll down a long, long way to get there), and you will find that one by one these handouts will be repealed...
According to this chart, the government had announced some $829 billion of “low-carbon energy investments” since the IRA, of which $320 billion had already been spent, and $529 billion remained “pending.” So it looks like the BBB, if it makes it through the Senate, will be undoing over $500 billion in wasteful green energy spending...
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/25/the-big-beautiful-bill-climate-and-energy-provisions/
I know Miller is married, and I hope he and his wife are popping out little Stephen Millers as quickly as possible, so we can have even more of them in an administration in 30 years.
“A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to ‘mandatory’ spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps,” he wrote on X. “The senate rules prevent it from cutting ‘discretionary’ spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants.
Fine. So why doesn't it line out Medicaid funding for illegal aliens?
Because they aren't as smart as you, obviously.
Why can't they think of that? 🤡
Bookmarking
From GPT:
Between 2017 and 2023, federal and state spent $27B on Emergency Med services for illegals (I am rewording undocumented migrants). This amount was <1% of total Medicaid expenditures over that period.
Some states (Calif and Minn e.g.) have expanded Medicaid funding to illegals, but this amount is covered only by the state portion of Medicaid spending (the program is a combo of federal and state).
Bottom line: Do not kneejerk about illegals on Medicaid. It’s not a driver in the budget challenge under debate. They just don’t add up to significant portions.
The SALT deduction increase doesn’t have to be given to every area of the USA.
Filibuster and your state will not get an increased SALT deduction.
The tax cut continuation doesn’t have to be given to every area of the USA.
Filibuster and your state will not get the tax cut continuation.
So you want to filibuster?
In any year the senator of any state filibusters or otherwises impedes legislation which President Trump has previiously declared ‘muy importante’ for more than one hour in total, the residents of that state shall not be entitled to the benefits provided by this legislation.
The Democratic senators should be encouraged to fight against tax cut contunations and raising the SALT and debt limits.
There wouldn’t be any judges blocking that. 🤡
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