'America cannot afford this': Washington Post tears into Republicans' 'cynical' megabill

21 May

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 15, 2024 (photo from Maxim Elramsisy/ Shutterstock.com)

One of the nation's leading newspapers of record is now publicly calling for the defeat of President Donald Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" over the financial harm it would cause in the coming years, should it pass.

In a Wednesday editorial, the Washington Post expressed alarm that both Trump and the Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress were eager to pass legislation that the Congressional Budget Office projected would raise the deficit by $2.3 trillion over the next 10 years. The paper also reminded readers that Republicans are aiming to pass the bill shortly after Moody's downgraded the United States' credit rating for the first time in history.

"America cannot afford this," the Post's editorial board wrote, describing the Republicans' math used to justify a 10-year extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts as "cynical."

"The assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves by turbocharging economic growth has proved wrong so many times since it was first jotted on an napkin in the 1970s, it has come to sound cynical," the editorial read. "Some of the most recent research has found that lowering the corporate tax rate in 2017 encouraged some investment, but its modest impact on growth was swamped by lost tax revenue."

According to the Post, Republicans' argument that cuts to Medicaid (the program that provides health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans) don't hold water. The paper further cast doubt on claims that Trump's tariffs on the United States' trade partners would offset the sky-high cost of the tax cut extension, and argued that it could end up creating a disastrous feedback loop that results in economic calamity.

"Republicans are poised to deliver a package that stands to widen both the budget deficit and trade deficit — which will expand as foreign money is drawn to fund America’s budgetary hole," the Post wrote. "The Federal government would need to increase borrowing and this, in turn would raise interest rates, crowding out private investment and putting a substantial drag on the economy."

The paper argued that if Congress wants to keep the country fiscally solvent, it will have no choice but to allow some of Trump's most costly tax cuts to expire, and make deficit reduction "a top economic priority." House Republicans are scheduled to hold another major vote on the legislation Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.

Click here to read the Post's editorial in full (subscription required).

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