|
If you thought the House bill borrowed too much – and it did – the Senate manages to make things even worse. This $4 trillion borrowing bonanza is fiscally dangerous at a time of already exploding debt. It would borrow $1 trillion more than the House bill, violates the House’s reconciliation instructions by hundreds of billions of dollars, and is littered with special interest giveaways.
Compared to the House bill, the Senate waters down many of the spending cuts, expands the tax cuts, removes loophole closers, offers new vote-buying spending and tax breaks, creates a new radiation exposure entitlement program, and somehow ends up including a SALT cap expansion more egregious than the House version. And the bill continues to rely on arbitrary expirations that set the stage for $1 trillion or more of further borrowing.
The Senate bill doesn’t even come close to meeting the House requirement for at least $2 trillion of spending cuts or else adjustments to the tax bill.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the bill would also accelerate the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare to 2032 – just seven years from now.
Obviously, no lawmaker should vote on this bill without seeing the official score, but it is going to fall short by a stunning amount.
The current Senate bill should be rejected out of hand. We already have debt approaching record levels and interest costs exploding. Now’s not the time to make our debt problems worse.
|