16 Thoughts On The Republican Budget Atrocity

This bill is vile to a degree that befits the devil’s bargain Republicans made with Donald Trump. Indeed, this bill is why they made the bargain a decade ago. As time passed, they naturally stopped thinking of it as a devil’s bargain and simply started seeing it as a great bargain—civic degeneracy and social darwinism became the GOP’s favorite flavor combination. But a bill like this is what made the arrangement work in the first place.

Trump thus surpasses George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan in the pantheon of American right-wing elites who have sought to tax cut the government into austerity for the poor. Bush got the tax cuts done, but the beast just grew. All it took was dialing the bad faith and deceit up from a six to an 11.

The bill passes as the Trump economy is softening as anticipated. The data is mixed, but the economy is weaker now than when Trump took over, mostly because of things he’s already done. In the medium run, this bill will tend to raise prices and cost jobs, exacerbating the damage.

But in the short run I expect this bill will change very little. Reckless as it is, making Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent doesn’t flood the economy with more inflationary money than is currently circulating; meanwhile, most of the bill’s austerity measures don’t take effect for quite a while. As law, this should exacerbate inflation expectations, but Trump’s opportunism seems to scramble those a bit. (All bets are off if Trump tries to fire Jerome Powell, though.)

One more caveat: The bill’s hundred-billion dollar ICE slush fund and gulag budget could dampen the economy on both the expectations and material side by crushing immigrant labor supply. Dragnets will multiply, more immigrants will hide.

Quite apart from the economics, this secret police force and the prison network that will be built for it, is the most repugnant and frightening aspect of the bill; Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps can be funded again, clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network, overseen by Trump-loyal paramilitaries, with no resources for due process, will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. This is Stephen Miller’s wet dream and it will stain the whole country.

Monitor independent news and investigative reporting at reputable outlets. There is no way to build a police bureaucracy at this scale, on this timeline, without attracting tons of corruption, sloppiness, and abuse. We know this from recent experience. I would bet that, in the not too distant future, we’ll learn ICE hired Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, and other criminal thugs...