Upon Further Reflection...

...this legislation is even worse than I thought.

July 12, 2025 ~ Vol. 32

It has been a week since the passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and we all have had some time to read about it and I have also had time to consider the analyses of the folks that I depend on to explain these things and frame the potential impact in a proper perspective. Sometimes you have to take the projections of the think tanks and talking heads who have overtly partisan leanings with the proverbial grain of salt. Their views are biased for all of the obvious reasons, for better or for worse. In cases like this I am also left wondering about the projections of some reputable organizations that had looked at this bill and concluded that its passage would ultimately lead to eleven or twelve million people losing their health care coverage, or for X number of hospitals to close in Y number of regions. Calculating impacts can be complicated. Only time will tell how much of the tab that the Feds were covering will ultimately be assumed by the individual states or local municipalities. After some years of paying attention, you come to trust certain sources as competent and truthful, and others, not so much. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers did offer a hopeful observation in his NY Times Editorial this week, writing that the most draconian cuts for Medicaid beneficiaries are not triggered until after the 2026 midterms, leaving open the possibility of a reprieve from a new or enlightened Congress. Unfortunately, even under the most optimistic assumptions and predictions, the impact of this legislation is going to be catastrophic.

We had occasion to spend some time in the car this week which allowed us to take in a few pod cast episodes from a few of our favorite pundits, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on Pivot, and Impolitic with John Heilman interviewing Andrew Sullivan, which included a bit of NSFW content (fair warning) that you might expect from a gay, Catholic, conservative commentator. Sullivan opined that the ramp up in anti-immigrant policing was a natural reaction to the overly permissive immigration policies of the Biden administration, which had granted emergency asylum status, imprudently in his opinion, to hundreds of thousands of refugees in recent years. Both Heilman and Sullivan took issue with the methods that ICE has adopted in prosecuting their mission, with Heilman going so far as to call the force a modern-day Gestapo and Trump’s personal police force. Sullivan called ICE out for grossly overstepping policing protocols— not identifying their agents who wear masks but not badges or identifying uniforms. If you are not willing to identify yourself as a federal agent, then you should stay home, he suggested. ICE has responded to those criticisms in the past by saying that their agents have been subjected to abuse, including doxxing and that they only mask as a precaution. That excuse falls flat in my opinion as ICE agents have no more exposure than agents from any other agencies like US Marshals or FBI agents or even local State Troopers, all of whom must adhere to professional rules of conduct, including identifying themselves as agents or police officers. Yesterday, a federal court judge in California agreed, ordering the agency to cease and desist.

Judge Blocks Trump Administration Tactics in L.A. Immigration Raids

A federal judge temporarily halted the administration from making indiscriminate arrests based on race and denying detainees access to lawyers, in a lawsuit that could have national repercussions.

Increasing border security is not a partisan issue. In the final year of the Biden administration a bipartisan bill to enhance border security was advancing through the committee process when Trump ordered Republicans to withdraw support for the legislation. He did not want Democrats to get the credit because border security was his primary campaign rally story line, and one that he did not want to lose. His Big Beautiful Bill goes far beyond beefing up the security at the border, with most of the $178 billion dollars in new funding (over the next ten years) going to new detention facilities and domestic policing. The new funding will make ICE’s budget the largest of all federal policing agencies, exceeding even the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. As former President Biden often said, “show me the budget and I’ll show you their values.” Trump originally stated that ICE would focus their activities on detaining and deporting criminals that had entered the county illegally. After he was elected those detentions quickly escalated and expanded to include raids at any place that immigrant populations were concentrated, including places of employment. Raids were conducted in restaurant kitchens and Home Depot parking lots where migrants gathered seeking day labor employment. Any pretense of focusing on criminals was abandoned. According to the Washington Post, “while the number of convicted criminals held in ICE detention is about 1.6 times what it was before Trump took office, the number of detainees with zero criminal convictions or charges is up 1400 percent, according to Syracuse University researcher, Austin Kocher.”

I was not surprised to read the opinions of many observers, describing the underlying premise of much of the new tax bill as simply a “reverse Robin Hood”, to take money from working families, especially low-income families, to fund tax cuts for top earners. Money saved by implementing cuts to Medicaid was used to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, and to reallocate those dollars to greatly expand the budgets and the mandates of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Money that had provided incentives for clean energy initiatives was reallocated to new incentives for oil drilling and coal mining, of all things. Show me their budget and I’ll show you their values.

Twenty years ago, you could not pick up a paper without reading an article about how horrible the air pollution was in China, who primarily utilized coal fired powerplants to produce electricity. Fast forward twenty years and China has prioritized clean energy along with solar panels and wind turbine production. They now lead the world in electric vehicle production, commanding 70% of all global sales. Faced with that reality, Trump has decided to prioritize…wait for it…carbon fuels. And reopening coal mines. And expanding oil and gas drilling incentives. The US Post office was in the process of converting their delivery fleet to EV’s and Republicans actually had a provision in the Big Beautiful Bill to scrap the 7200 vehicles that were already in service at a cost of $1.5 billion. Thankfully, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the proposal would require a 60/40 supermajority to pass, and that part of the bill was scuttled.

The legislative initiatives in this bill were not included upon reaching a consensus after rigorous debate on the merits of the proposal and their projected impacts. The entire planet is converting to renewable energy, but Trump wants to reopen the coal mines and Drill Baby Drill? These proposals were not included to respond to the demands or desires of the voters, who overwhelming disapproved of the bill, especially the components that reduced Medicaid benefits for low-income families. These initiatives were included for one reason and only one reason—to acknowledge and codify Trump’s whims and campaign promises into law, all fast-tracked to accommodate an arbitrary target date set by the President, on a timetable that allowed for a made for TV July 4^th signing ceremony. Trump, of course, trumpeted the unpopular legislation as the most popular legislation in the history of legislation.

I continue to be amazed at the way that Republicans in Congress have capitulated to Trump’s whims, even when it means a complete and absolute abandonment of long-standing Republican party platform positions and planks. Ten years ago, Republicans would threaten to shut down the government rather than add a dollar to the national debt. Tea Party Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, which was necessary to issue new Treasuries to finance the debt and pay required interest payments on our outstanding obligations. This current Congress does not flinch at adding trillions – not billions, but trillions, one million million dollars—of additional debt, which is being used primarily to give tax cuts to our wealthiest taxpayers. Republicans balked at taking on debt to finance programs to sustain the economy when it was actually necessary, and prudent, like during the financial crisis, or during the pandemic when millions of people were thrown out of work, but now, when we are at full employment and the economy is doing fine, they want to balloon the budget to finance a tax cut for billionaires. This makes absolutely no sense, and more importantly is edging us closer to a fiscal cliff which will be very difficult to climb back from. I wrote about the approaching debt crisis in a recent post, and this recent legislation will exacerbate the problem significantly. In a recent New York Times editorial, Jared Bernstein, long time economic advisor to President Biden—and no deficit hawk by any stretch—opined that we are ignoring this ballooning debt at our peril. Debt financing works, until it doesn’t, and then, usually it’s too late. (See: Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Athens collapse, Germany’s economic decline leading to the rise of Hitler, the French Revolution, etc.)

Bernstein reminds readers that as long as the economy is growing at a rate faster than the interest rate on the debt, everything can work fine. He offers the standard cautions: if interest rates rise, it will make the debt unmanageable, and if President Trump’s tariff wars cause a spike in inflation, as is widely predicted, interest rates will spike with inflation. If the economy slows and interest rates exceed the growth in GDP, all bets are off. We can continue down this path as long as investors are willing to own US debt, i.e.: loan us money. If the global community backs away from US government paper, they will sell their treasuries, causing a drop in bond prices, with a corresponding increase in interest rates. (Just the) interest payments on our national debt now exceed our total outlays for defense spending. This is unsustainable. This is also insane.

It is worth pointing out that this legislation totally ignored the approaching insolvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. Not only did the legislation not address that impending crisis, but Trump’s promise to end the taxation of Social Security benefits will actually compound it, because those tax revenues were used to offset payments to current recipients. (The actual bill will end the taxation of benefits for most, but not all recipients, depending on their total income.) None of Social Security’s cash flow issues were addressed by the White House or Congress and the longer that they delay the more expensive the fix is going to be. Democrats do not get a pass on ignoring this issue; they also did absolutely nothing to fix the problem when they were in control.

I would much prefer to be making my arguments against Trump’s initiatives based upon the merits and the economics of each proposal. Unfortunately, his ideas and proposals and Executive Orders are not based upon economic principals, or even logic. They are, for the most part, performative, and based on his whims which all too often are rooted in revenge and retribution. This week’s latest completely out of the blue tariff announcement is a case in point. Trump declared an imposition of a 50% tariff on any and all products imported from Brazil . Just by way of background, Brazil is the largest economy in Latin America and among the top ten largest economies in the world. We also have a trade surplus, not a deficit, with Brazil, and Trump insists these new tariffs are compensation for “unfair” trade balances, so what is the point of imposing a tariff, exactly? The point was soon revealed when Trump posted on social media that the new tariff was being put in place because of the way that Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro was being treated. Seriously, you can look it up. Bolsonaro is on trial for conspiring to retain his office after he lost the last election. His followers stormed the capitol in an effort to overturn the results. Some of his military co-conspirators have testified against him, but Trump calls the trial a “witch hunt”. Does any of this sound familiar? Bolsonaro is a longtime supporter of President Trump. Go figure.

Trump’s proposals are not being made based upon any sound economic principals; they are being driven simply by revenge and retribution, and the Congress, which is supposed to be providing checks and balances to a rogue White House, does absolutely nothing. The midterms are eighteen months away. We can only hope that the rest of the country is paying attention.

And another thing…

Whoever could have predicted this?

U.S. measles cases hit highest level in 33 years, CDC reports

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