Big, beautiful bill battle ignores the real issue: crippling US debt

As the “big, beautiful” bill moves through Congress, one legitimate concern is the future course of federal borrowing — except that Washington’s standard ways of looking at taxation and spending do more to confuse than clarify the key issues.Confusion that hides the truth that Republicans probably aren’t cutting Uncle Sam’s outlays as much as they should.Yes, you’ll hear endless wailing about the bill’s “savage spending cuts” in order to “pay for” tax cuts “for the rich,” even as it supposedly accelerates Uncle Sam’s borrowing — but claims rely exclusively on how all this gets measured.For starters: Most of the “cost” of the bill’s tax cuts, as set this week by the House Ways and Means Committee, is for simply avoiding economy-crushing tax hikes.That is: The measure extends the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which officially are set to expire this year — slamming Americans of all incomes as well as hitting businesses large and small, and likely pushing the country into recession just as it began booming after the 2017 rates went into effect.The truly new tax cuts here are the ones Trump campaigned on: no tax on tips (which Kamala Harris said she’d do, too), no tax on overtime pay and so on — none of it a “tax cut for the rich.”Meanwhile, the changes to spending under the “big, beautiful” bill aren’t cuts as normal people would count them.

Consider: As things stand, the Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next decade Uncle Sam will spend $89.3 trillion. With the hated “cuts”, that figure drops to ..

.$88.1 trillion. In yearly terms, that’s “only” a 40% increase over the gigantic $7 trillion 2024 outlay, instead of a 50% rise. That is, the feds will be on track to spend way more than they did last year, just not quite as much more.

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