(C) Idaho Capital Sun
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Republicans used to be the fiscally conservative party, but look at us now • Idaho Capital Sun [1]
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Date: 2025-07-03
Do you remember when the Republican Party was known as the party of fiscal responsibility? Do you remember when Donald Trump promised that he would drain the swamp? Do you remember when the Republicans bragged about being the party of the working people?
Well, those days are over, and those campaign-trail promises, as it turns out, had the short life span of a gnat. On Tuesday, after 23 hours of debate, the Republican Senate passed a bill that cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion, increases the national debt by at least $3.3 trillion, while cutting funding for low-income working Americans, children, and veterans by $1 billion.
The so-called “big, beautiful” only passed with the vote of Vice President J.D. Vance who broke a 50-50 tie. Three Republicans — U.S. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — voted against the bill, along with all Democratic senators.
The “big, beautiful” bill is a betrayal of the working people of America as it gives most of the tax cuts to the richest Americans who already control 70 percent of the wealth in the country, according to Statista, a global business data company. In short, “the big, beautiful” bill turns Robinhood on his head – it takes money from the working people of America and gives it to the richest in the largest shift of wealth in American history.
In 2027, 68 percent of the tax cuts will go to the top 20 percent of American households, while 9 percent of the cuts will go to the middle class, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan congressional committee that since 1926 has kept the scorecard on tax policy.
Ken Smetters, a researcher at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, reports that the school’s analysis shows the top 10 percent of income holders will receive $3.1 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years.
And it’s not like they need it. Just over the past year the wealth of the 10 richest men in America, and they are all men, increased by $365 billion, a remarkable $1 billion a day increase, CNN reported in May.
How will the Republicans’ reconciliation package affect programs in Idaho?
Meanwhile, the “big, beautiful” bill cuts at least $800 billion from the Medicaid budget, which one out of every five Idahoans depend upon for their health insurance and rural hospitals depend on to survive. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says it will kick 12 million people off Medicaid over the next 10 years.
And one wonders if the party of “family values” also realizes that half of all births in Idaho and at least 40 percent of births in other states are paid for by Medicaid. How will those families pay for the birth of their children if they lose their Medicaid services?
The “big, beautiful” bill will cut another $300 billion – 30 percent – from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which feeds millions of low-income children and senior citizens.
Ironically, these cuts could shift much of the cost of these programs back to Idaho if lawmakers choose to keep programs at their current level. This means any benefit average Idahoans might see in their federal taxes will be offset by increased taxes at the state level. And the timing is bad because we already know Idaho’s tax revenue isn’t coming in as expected and Gov. Brad Little is looking at budget cuts of up to 6 percent.
Idahoans may also be shocked when their rural hospital closes because of the Medicaid cuts. Political historian Heather Cox Richardson over the weekend quoted Politico as saying every major health system in Louisiana is warning House Speaker Mike Johnson that the “big, beautiful” bill’s cuts to Medicaid “would be historic in their devastation.”
How will the reconciliation bill affect the federal debt?
And even budget hawks should be screeching over the bill. It will add $4.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, including interest payments on the debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That is a debt that our children and grandchildren will be stuck paying off, with interest, for decades to come.
After the bill passed, Elon Musk took to social media to chastise senators like Idaho’s Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo who have always criticized government spending. He said those senators “should hang their heads in shame” for supporting a bill that adds trillions to the national debt.
But Crapo will probably tell Idahoans that the bill only adds about $400 billion to the debt. That’s because he got a provision in the bill that includes an accounting sleight of hand called “current policy guidelines” that tries to hide the real increase to the debt.
But, as much as Crapo wants you to think that two, plus two equals zero, mathematics, unlike politicians, can’t lie. When you give trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy you are going to run up the national debt.
Donald Trump and Republican supporters of the “big, beautiful” bill say that it will pay for itself with a boost to the economy. But that’s not true. Even the conservative Tax Foundation says that it will add only 0.1 percent per year on average over the next decade to the Gross National Product (GNP), thus erasing only about 19 percent of the bill’s impact on the national debt. Wharton School pegs the GNP growth even lower, a measly 0.5 percent over 10 years and 1.7 percent over 30 years.
Americans are not stupid. They see what the president and Congress are doing. A survey by the nonprofit KFF in early June shows that 64 percent of Americans oppose the “big, beautiful” tax cut. That same survey shows that Americans support Medicaid by a whopping 83 percent.
Even some Republicans fear what the “big, beautiful” bill will do to their political future. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley says the cuts to Medicaid are “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” even though he ended up voting for the bill. Sen. Thom Tillis says that voters will punish Republicans at the polls. Tony Fabrizio, who conducts polling for Trump, warns that voters have “no appetite” for the Medicaid cuts.
Other senators say their colleagues are overreacting – the Medicaid cuts and tax cuts for the rich will have no impact on voters. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues that voters will “get over it,” according to Punchbowl News. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said Medicaid voters should not worry about the cuts, adding “we are all going to die.”
Voters and identity politics v. actual policy
Donald Trump is betting that his true-blue supporters, which make up many of the voters who receive Medicaid benefits, will forget that he is cutting their health care, while providing tax cuts to the wealthy. And he may be right.
A study by Michael Shepherd, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, conducted a study that showed that rural hospital closures decreased when state legislatures expanded Medicaid, as voters did in Idaho. Meanwhile, hospital closures increased in red states where lawmakers refused to expand Medicaid.
Yet Shepherd’s study showed that in communities that lost their hospital, support for Republicans increased 10-15 percent.
Larry Bartels, a professor at Vanderbilt University, explained such a dichotomy by saying voters make decisions more on “identity” politics than on political “policy” decisions. In other words, when Donald Trump promises to “drain the swamp” they will vote for him even if they lose their health care in the process, while the swamp isn’t drained.
But one wonders if that will remain true when most voters see that the president and the Republican Congress are making a clear choice to favor the rich over working people, while betraying the party’s long-standing claim that they balance the budget just the same way American families do.
It also might not be lost on many Americans that over the past weekend, when the Senate worked overtime to pass the “big, beautiful” bill, the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, got married in Venice. The wedding, which included 200 guests like fellow billionaire Bill Gates, cost $20 million, 600 times the cost of the average American wedding, according to Forbes.
The 2025 “big beautiful” tax bill will likely make Bezos’ Amazon company even more profitable. The first four years after Trump’s last “big, beautiful” tax cut went into effect in 2017 Amazon’s effective tax rates was 5 percent, about four times lower than what the average American pays in income taxes, according to The Nation magazine.
If the Republicans and the president really cared for the average American, if they really supported working people, they would have cut fewer programs these citizens rely on and targeted most of the tax cuts to the middle class. This would have put money in the pockets of families who need it most and add nothing to the national debt because the wealthiest Americans, who often avoid taxes thanks to highly paid accountants, would pay more of their fair share.
Americans must be starting to ask themselves: The president and Republican Congress are looking out for the millionaires and billionaires, but who is looking out for us?
This time Idahoans, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump, may well see that the president and Congress are not draining the swamp – they are taking a pleasant swim in it. And, for them, and their wealthy benefactors, the water feels just fine.
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