Tag Archive for: deficit

EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Thomas Massie Reveals What Would Get Him To ‘Yes’ On Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

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Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie revealed in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller that he could vote “yes” on President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” if a “skinny” version of the legislation materializes.

Massie has said he will not support the bill in its current form because it does not cut government spending substantially enough. Massie’s opposition to the bill is one reason Trump and his political allies have threatened to primary him in the 2026 midterms. Pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is also trying to primary Massie, according to a source who spoke to the Caller.

There is a version of the bill, though, Massie said he could support. In a group text with about ten other congressmen, called “Budget Hawks,” Massie said they have floated the idea of splitting the bill in two.

“I can tell you the conservatives in the house are getting antsy with every change that happens in the Senate, and there’s a concern that maybe they need to just skinny this thing down and try to do just a few things,” he asserted, adding that they may try to do “two bills instead of one.”

“The first one should be just the absolute essentials to the president’s priorities, which would be, secure the border and extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” he explained.

Massie said he could theoretically support that bill depending on its impact on the deficit.

“It would be a lot of speculation to say that’s where we’re going to end up. But if we did end up there, and there was a repeal of the Green New Deal subsidies, I could be for that, possibly — I’d have to see the total budget impact in the House,” he told the Caller.

There have been several changes to the Senate version of the bill that have raised red flags for Massie. They stripped the REINS Act Provision — something Massie personally lobbied for in the House version — which requires congressional approval for major federal regulations before they take effect. The Senate is also mulling over a longer phaseout of renewable energy tax credits and whether to reduce the income cap for State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions. Massie said that lowering the threshold would benefit blue states more than red states.

“If they make that tweak, let’s say they limit the SALT deduction to people who make less than $400,000 a year, that means that more of the benefit of that tax provision will go to blue states instead of red states, because to be under whatever the threshold is — let’s just say $400,000 a year annual income and have $40,000 of state and local taxes or property taxes — means that you’re probably in a blue state,” he explained.

“I think the ultimate bill that the Senate passes, if they can pass one, is going to have an even worse impact on the deficit than the House bill,” he said.

Massie speculated that the president’s July 4 deadline is unlikely to be met by Congress and that House Speaker Mike Johnson’s promise to force Congress to meet over the holiday is likely an empty threat meant to appease Trump. The real deadline, Massie alleged, is sometime in August.

“I think they’ll use the threat of canceling the August recess … they’ll take a week off the August recess and say we’re in session, and then they’ll give it back to us if this bill passes,” he said.

Another sticking point for Massie is that he is using a shorter window to score the bill’s impact on the deficit. While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) typically scores bills on a ten-year timeline, Massie is only looking at the next three or four years. Trump’s plans for no tax on tips and overtime, and tax reform for seniors, for example, are set to expire after three years in the bill.

“The deficit impact is great over the next three years in the Big Bill that passed the House, and it’s only five years out when it starts to go in the other direction because they plan on having those tax cuts expire, and they plan on having that military spending expire,” he told the Caller. “But what will happen four years from now … is they’ll say, oh my gosh, that Congress four years ago and that president set up this fiscal cliff, and the impact to our military is going to be too great [if they let] the spending expire.”

“So we’ve got to use the current policy as the baseline,” he said.

Massie alleged that the House is effectively doing nothing while they wait for the Senate to deliver its version of the Big Beautiful Bill.

“The House is just sort of over here … treading water,” he asserted. “We’re just not doing much in the House. Where the speaker has the House looking like it’s busy … it’s not really that busy.”

AUTHOR

Amber Duke

Senior Editor. Follow Amber on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Massie Warns AIPAC, Trump’s War Against Him Could Backfire

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

11 Outrageous Failures in the GOP’s Trillion Dollar Bill by James Bovard

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Republican congressional leaders are like a football coach who believes the secret to winning is to punt early and often. House Speaker Paul Ryan and others are claiming victory over the 2,000-plus page appropriations bill, but this is a “no boondoggle left behind” $1.1 trillion nightmare.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers’ press release claims that the omnibus bill “helps to stop waste and administrative overreach.” Instead, the bill ravages both paychecks and freedom. No wonder White House spokesman Josh Earnest gushed Wednesday: “We feel good about the outcome.”

Here’s the tip of the iceberg of the bill’s outrages:

  1. The bill fails to block President Obama from delivering up to $3 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, a partial product of the Paris climate summit. Republicans initially planned to block such funding unless the Senate was permitted to vote on the U.N. climate treaty. But since the omnibus bill failed to prohibit such payments, Obama will soon deliver $500 million in U.S. tax money to the fund — despite the legendary record of U.N. programs for corruption worse than Chicago.
  2. The bill fails to block perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency’s greatest land grab — its “waters of the United States” decree that seizes federal jurisdiction over 20 million acres that are sometimes wet. The EPA’s wetland crackdowns have been trounced by numerous judges. Republicans faltered even though the Government Accountability Office reported Monday that EPA had engaged in illegal “covert propaganda” to promote this policy.
  3. It provides more than $3.7 billion for economic and military aid to Afghanistan, though an Agency for International Development study recently warned that some projects “actually had the perverse effect of increasing support for the Taliban.” Afghan relief continues to be a hopeless mess; the AID inspector general reported last week that the agency’s highly touted new monitoring system was used for less than 1% of grants and contracts.
  4. It fails to block the imminent proclamation of Food and Drug Administration regulations that could severely impact the sale of most of the cigars now marketed in the U.S., as well as ravaging the burgeoning e-cigarette industry (which experts say provides a healthier alternative to cigarettes).
  5. The omnibus bill failed to include a provision to end Operation Choke Point, a Justice Department-Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s crackdown that pressured banks to cancel the accounts of gun stores, coin dealers, payday lenders and other disfavored industries in what Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., derided as “weaponizing government to meet their ideological beliefs.”
  6. The average federal worker is already paid more than $100,000 a year in total compensation, but the budget deal failed to block Obama from giving them a 1.3% raise — though many, if not most, taxpayers received zilch raise this year.
  7. The bill extends the earned income tax credit without reforming it — though the IRS estimates that up to 25% of all handouts under the law are fraudulent or otherwise improper.
  8. The omnibus bill dropped a House provision that would have required stronger evidence for federally proclaimed Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Earlier official guidelines have been widely discredited and are often blamed for contributing to the nation’s obesity crisis, but the same dubious evidence standard can be used in the future.
  9. The bill provides almost $27 billion for public housing and Section 8. That includes an almost half a billion dollar increase for subsidized rental vouchers, despite the long record of havoc in neighborhoods where recipients cluster. The omnibus bill also dropped provisions to curb the Department of Housing and Urban Development from bankrolling fair housing entrapment-like operations or enforcing new regulations to bludgeon localities with a lower percentage of minorities than the national averages.
  10. Some provisions of the bill seem harebrained even by Beltway standards. Republicans were justifiably outraged by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ “Fast and Furious” operation, which authorized sending more than a thousand guns to Mexican drug cartels.
    Section 276 of the omnibus bill prohibits federal agents from providing guns to anyone he “knows or suspects … is an agent of a drug cartel, unless law enforcement personnel of the United States continuously monitor or control the firearm at all times.”
    So the G-man is supposed to keep his finger on the suspect’s trigger at all times, or what? Perhaps it would be too easy to cease giving weapons to drug dealers.
  11. Perhaps the most appalling part of the omnibus are the provisions that authorize tech and communication companies to secretly provide your personal data to federal agencies — no search warrant required.
    The American Civil Liberties Union warns that this information “can be used for criminal prosecutions unrelated to cyber security, including the targeting of whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act.”
    Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., rightly warns that a vote for the omnibus bill is a “vote to support unconstitutional surveillance on law-abiding Americans.”

While Congress made scant effort to protect average Americans from rampaging regulators, it hustled to include a provision requesting the Capitol Police to permit sledding on Capitol Hill. The “sled free or die” provision was a “bipartisan win,” according to the Washington Post. It is regrettable that there was little or no bipartisan interest in curbing federal power beyond spitting distance from the Capitol Dome.

House Freedom Caucus member Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., summarized the GOP leadership’s wacky reasoning: “Give the Democrats what they want now so next time they won’t want as much.”

Republicans have been thunderously promising for decades to protect Americans against federal waste, fraud and abuse. At this rate, Republicans’ credibility gap will soon rival the $18 trillion federal debt.

Reprinted with permission from USA Today.

James Bovard

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, includingPublic Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard.

Washington Shame Game: Dumb Things Politicians Say

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The first edition of the game that tests viewer knowledge of shameful things officials say. How good is your knowledge of the shameful statements by elected officials?… test yourself here:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/3odYWZIv-4E[/youtube]

 

EDITORS NOTE: The edited featured image was originally taken by Anthony Easton. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Hasner Campaign: Both Parties Created This Jobs Crisis

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This week the Adam Hasner for US House Campaign launches the “It’s About Math” informational series. Between now and Election Day, Adam will be focusing on the real numbers and real issues of great importance to the residents of Florida’s District 22.

“So many people I speak with, regardless of political party, are sick and tired of the name calling and scare tactics,” Adam Hasner said. “What they really want to know is whether or not you have a plan to get America’s fiscal house in order and get our economy moving again. Every day I am talking about just that. I’m hopeful this debate can be about the real differences I have with my opponent on getting spending under control, creating jobs and improving the lives of people in our community. Solving our nation’s problems isn’t about Republicans or Democrats or any political philosophy. It’s about math.”

A key number from the August jobs report released last week was 368,000. That is the number of Americans who stopped looking for work and are no longer counted in the US labor force by the United States Labor Department. (Wall Street Journal, Five Key Takeaways from Jobs Report, 9/7/12).

“This number itself is telling, but it also says more about the individual stories of the college student who can’t find a job, a dad who got laid off, a mom who’s working less hours than she wants to or needs to, a senior who’s had to go back to work to make ends meet because they lost their retirement savings,” said Hasner.

“Behind this number are the stories of the people who are losing hope and beginning to believe that our country’s best days are behind us. It’s distressing that people are giving up. We can do better and they deserve better.

“While the official unemployment rate hovers above 8% for the 43rd consecutive month – perpetuating the slowest economic recovery in decades – Lois Frankel continues to distract attention from spending and the economy and remains silent about what should we do to create jobs.

“That’s most likely because she knows her record on job creation as Mayor was abysmal. Lois Frankel entered office in West Palm Beach with the city’s unemployment rate at 5.4%. But by the time she left office 8 years later, the unemployment rate in her city had climbed to 10.6%. The numbers prove that she didn’t have solutions for West Palm Beach and she’s failed to offer any ideas on how to get our nation’s economy back on track.

“Mayor Frankel continues to support the same misguided Washington policies that for the last 43 months have been failing small businesses, families and hard-working Americans.

“Both parties got us into this mess, but now isn’t the time to point fingers and place blame. It’s time for a new approach:

  • We must reform the current tax code to make it flatter, fairer, and simpler and eliminate loopholes and exemptions.
  • We must eliminate hurdles to form new businesses and right-size regulations that are currently stifling economic growth with red tape and compliance costs and do it with a balanced approach that protects our natural resources and protects consumers.
  • We must unleash the power of Made in America energy with new technologies for safe development of domestic oil and natural gas. Affordable energy is a key factor in creating jobs and attracting companies to bring manufacturing jobs back home.
  • We must also focus on education and worker training initiatives to get the long term unemployed back to work.
  • “What small businesses need is certainty, knowing what to expect so they can make critical decisions to hire new employees, invest in new equipment, and expand their operations.

“It’s time for common-sense policies that will empower private sector job creation to help Main Street get back on its feet and get America’s economy back on the move.