Maddow Blog-Republicans embrace a gimmick to pretend their tax breaks for the wealthy are free

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The GOP tax breaks will cost trillions. According to a new Republican scheme, however, the cost is zero. If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is.

The Republicans' tax breaks will cost trillions. According to a scheme called "current policy baseline," Republican insist the actual cost is zero.

If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. It’s also something the parliamentarian might have a problem with, so they’re going around her.

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-06-30T14:51:50.582Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/republicans-embrace-gimmick-pretend-tax-breaks-wealthy-are-free-rcna215930

At this point, your loved ones would probably give you quizzical looks — and for good reason, since budgets don’t actually work this way. But as The Wall Street Journal reported, this is roughly the same reasoning Republicans are embracing when coming up with a price tag for the tax breaks in their GOP megabill, the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday.

“Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before — deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained on the Senate floor during the debate over the GOP’s reconciliation package.

When Republicans first approved massive tax breaks for the wealthy in 2017, they helped obscure the cost by giving the tax cuts an expiration date. Eight years later, the bill has come due, and many of these policies from Donald Trump’s first term are poised to expire. (The president likely assumed he’d be out of office by 2025, and this would be someone else’s problem. Instead, it’s his own problem.)

Traditionally, GOP officials have tried to pretend that tax cuts are free because they pay for themselves. That absurdity has repeatedly been debunked, but in the current debate, Republicans are pushing a different line: Tax cuts are free, the party is insisting, if they’re already in place.....

This position was endorsed by the Senate itself in a 53-47 vote on Monday morning.

The result is an inherently ridiculous dynamic: There will be one set of numbers rooted in arithmetic and used by the Congressional Budget Office, and there will be a rival set of numbers based on a Republican twist on arithmetic.

The New York Times reported that Democrats now believe that the Republican strategy “ultimately weakens the filibuster in the Senate and opens the door to Democrats, too, passing more expensive policies through the process in the future.” Indeed, NBC News’ Sahil Kapur noted via Bluesky that Democrats, in theory, could use the same approach to approve a Medicare-for-all bill for one year, at which point they could declare that all future years are free, all while operating under the same rules that Republicans now see as legitimate.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Senate Democrat: GOP budget math 'as fake as Donald Trump's tan'

Trickle down economics do not work and tax cuts do NOT pay for themselves

Senate Democrat: GOP budget math ‘as fake as Donald Trump’s tan’
Source: The Hill
share.newsbreak.com/dtwu2iy3

— Gary Schwall Sr. (@glschwall.bsky.social) 2025-06-30T23:05:17.340Z

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5376461-senator-wyden-criticizes-budget-math/

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) blasted Senate Republicans for using a controversial accounting measure while seeking to advance President Trump’s massive domestic policy legislation, saying it relies on “fake” math.

“The only way for Republicans to pass this horribly destructive bill, which is based on budget math as fake as Donald Trump’s tan, was to go nuclear and hide it behind a bunch of procedural jargon,” Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in a statement late Sunday.

“We’re now operating in a world where the filibuster applies to Democrats but not to Republicans, and that’s simply unsustainable given the triage that’ll be required whenever the Trump era finally ends,” he added.

Democrats have lashed out at Republicans for pressing forward with plans to advance their mammoth “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” using an accounting maneuver known as “current policy,” which scores the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts as not adding to the deficit.

The Congressional Budget Office considers the extension of the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, as adding to the deficit when using an alternative “current law” baseline.

[WSHazel]

3. Challenge the law in court

The law was passed violating the Senate’s own rules. Make Republicans declare the filibuster is dead.

[dalton99a]

2. Fucking frauds

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Boyle: If tax cuts paid for themselves, our national debt would not be $36 trillion.

Link to tweet

Boyle: If tax cuts paid for themselves, our national debt would not be $36 trillion.

The bulk of the added debt since 2001 has actually come from four different rounds of major tax cuts. 2001, 2003, their extension about a decade later and then the 2017 TCJA, all told that combines for more than $10 trillion in missing revenue that would've been there had we just kept in place tax rates as they were.