Republicans aren't just 'cooking the books' — they're 'torching' them: analysis

Senate Republicans managed to narrowly pass President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" to extend tax cuts for the wealthy, beef up immigration enforcement, and slash Medicaid, food assistance, and green energy credits — sending it to the House where it faces yet another round of hurdles and scrutiny as GOP leaders try to rush it through with as little dissent as possible.

But in doing so, GOP leaders reinvented how Senate budget procedures work in a way that makes no sense, wrote Catherine Rampell in a scathing analysis for The Washington Post.

"There are many unpopular features in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, including draconian cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, higher energy prices and trillions of dollars in additional debt," prompting lawmakers to rush the bill "with little time for the media (and, by extension, voters) to catch up to what’s in it," wrote Rampell — all the while "smearing the refs, including the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the professionals tasked with crunching numbers on the bill’s consequences. And on Sunday, Republicans hid from the Senate parliamentarian to avoid hearing her latest rulings about the cost of their bill."

But perhaps their boldest move, she continued, is that they "simply declared huge chunks of it to be free," by overriding the Senate parliamentarian to decree that since around $3.8 trillion of the bill comes from extending the 2017 tax cuts past their original expiration, that $3.8 trillion doesn't really count as new debt, because the 2017 tax cuts are now the baseline.

"This is not how budgets work," Rampell wrote. "It’s like saying renewing your Netflix subscription should count as free, because you got used to having the streaming service already. Or each time you buy another Starbucks coffee, it doesn’t cost you anything, because you’ve enjoyed Frappuccinos before. Or if your current car lease expires, getting a new one is now complimentary, because you already got used to the convenience of having a car."

The irony, she continued, is that in 2017, during the passage of the original tax cut bill, the GOP "deliberately scheduled their tax cuts to 'turn off' early, in 2025, rather than last forever ... to make the cost of what they were doing look smaller. What to do when those tax cuts expired — and how to pay for them — would be tomorrow’s problem. Well, tomorrow has arrived. And GOP leaders’ solution is not just to cook the books; it’s to torch them entirely, by pretending their tax cuts were already baked into future budgets, when they deliberately weren’t."

All of this will be terrible for the creditworthiness of U.S. debt and bond markets generally, Rampell wrote — exemplified by the fact that when Moody's downgraded U.S. credit status in May, they cited Republican plans to extend the tax cuts as part of why.

This accounting trick, Rampell concluded, "sets a terrible precedent for how future Congresses will handle difficult budget choices. And it’s a big, fat warning sign to bond investors. We might not have been terribly serious about getting our deficits under control before, but at least we attempted to tally them correctly. Now, you can’t even say that."