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The Parliamentarian Comes for the Beautiful Bill
As of Thursday evening, the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is no longer as big, and it never was all that beautiful. But the biggest decision, worth $3.76 trillion, could come as soon as today.
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline. Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion, depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost $3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is $400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget hawks in the Senate are grumbling about.
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline. Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion, depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost $3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is $400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget hawks in the Senate are grumbling about.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-24-parliamentarian-comes-for-beautiful-bill/