Showing posts with label Taxes 2025. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taxes 2025. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
House GOP can't agree to proceed to debating Senate reconciliation bill, vote stands at 206 Yea, 216 Nay (4 GOP against), with 10 GOP not voting
Yikes.
Even if all not voting GOP vote Yea, there's a tie. Not good enough.
And moments ago Thomas Massie changed his Yea to Nay lol.
Trump’s megabill is in real trouble; House GOP leaders need to flip a ‘no’ vote to a yes
Senate reconciliation bill gives chipmakers like TSMC more tax credits while cutting Medicaid
... Under the bill, passed by the Senate Tuesday, tax credits for those
semiconductor firms would rise to 35% from 25%. That’s more than the 30%
increase that had made it into a draft version of the bill. ...
The new provisions expand on tax incentives under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided grants of $39 billion and loans of $75 billion for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing projects. ...
... Recent changes to the bill would cut roughly $1.1 trillion in health-care spending over the next decade, according to new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
More than $1 trillion of those cuts would come from Medicaid, a joint federal and state health insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans, according to the CBO. The funding cuts go beyond insurance coverage: The loss of that funding could gut many rural hospitals that disproportionately rely on federal spending.
The CBO estimates that the current version of the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing health insurance by 2034, with the majority of those people losing Medicaid coverage. ...
Approximately 72 million Americans are currently enrolled in Medicaid, about one-fifth of the total U.S. population, according to government data. Medicaid is the primary payer for the majority of nursing home residents, and pays for around 40% of all births. ...
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
The US Senate's biggest phony, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, boasted he had enough votes to stop Trump's bill, but voted for it all three times in the end
The roll call votes are here, here, and here.
June 4, 2025, here:
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” as “immoral” and “grotesque,” and reiterated that he will vote against it unless his GOP colleagues make major changes.
“This is immoral, what us old farts doing to our young people,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” after sounding alarms that the massive tax-and-spending-cut bill would add trillions of dollars to national deficits.
“This is grotesque, what we’re doing,” Johnson said. “We need to own up to that. This is our moment.”
“I can’t accept the scenario, I can’t accept it, so I won’t vote for it, unless we are serious about fixing it,” he continued.
Johnson has been among the Senate’s loudest GOP critics of the budget bill that narrowly passed the House last month.
Johnson and other fiscal hawks have taken aim over its effect on the nation’s debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated later Wednesday that the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Johnson has proposed splitting the bill into two parts, though Trump insists on passing his agenda in a single package.
“The president and Senate leadership has to understand that we’re serious now,” Johnson said of himself and the handful of other GOP senators whose opposition to the bill could imperil its chances.
“They all say, ‘Oh, we can pressure these guys.’ No, you can’t.”
Republicans hold a narrow 53-47 majority in the Senate, so they can only afford to lose a handful of votes to get the bill passed in a party-line vote.
“Let’s discuss the numbers, and let’s focus on our children and grandchildren, whose futures are being mortgaged, their prospects are being diminished by what we are doing to them,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s comments came one day after Elon Musk ripped into the spending bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” that will lead to exploding deficits. The White House brushed aside Musk’s comments.
Johnson said Musk’s criticisms bolster the case against the bill.
“He’s in the inside, he showed … President Trump how to do this, you know, contract by contract, line by line,” Johnson said of Musk. “We have to do that.”
Johnson said his campaign against the bill in its current form is not a “long shot,” because he thinks there are “enough” Republican senators who will vote against the bill.
“We want to see [Trump] succeed, but again, my loyalty is to our kids and grandkids,” he said.
“So there’s enough of us who have that attitude that very respectfully we just have say, ’Mr. President, I’m sorry, ‘one, big, beautiful bill’ was not the best idea,” he added.
GOP coward Senator Lisa Murkowski today hopes the US House will fix the reconciliation bill she just voted for, just like GOP coward Rep. Chip Roy hoped in May the US Senate would fix the reconciliation bill he just voted for
You can't make this up!
Cowards hope someone else will do what must be done.
Heroes do it themselves.
Vote Nay for once!
The dark side had to come to the rescue of Trump's reconciliation bill in the U.S. Senate THREE TIMES
Vance breaks 50-50 tie as Senate passes GOP megabill after voting around the clock
Vice President Vance cast the tie-breaking vote as Senate Republicans on Tuesday delivered a huge legislative victory for President Trump by passing his One Big, Beautiful Bill Act after hours of tense negotiations that lasted through the night. ...
 |
| the three ties which J. D. Vance had to break |
Monday, June 30, 2025
Phony Republican current policy baseline says Trump tax cuts will cost $0 going forward, Congressional Budget Office says $3.5 trillion
Graham claims sole authority to decide if GOP megabill complies with budget laws
... Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Budget Committee, immediately appealed the ruling of the chair.
He pointed to a letter he received from Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel asserting that the Finance portion of the bill would increase federal deficit by $3.5 trillion between 2025 and 2034 and increase deficits beyond the 10-year budget window, which ends in 2034.
“The ability of the chair to create a phony baseline has never been used in reconciliation, not ever,” Merkley argued.
“This breaks a 51-year tradition of the Senate for honest numbers,” he declared.
Merkley’s appeal of the chair’s ruling empowering Graham failed by a party-line vote. Senators rejected it by a vote of 53 to 47. ...
Every Republican in the U.S. Senate drank the koolaid this morning and voted for the current policy baseline, including Thom Tillis, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, you name 'em, they voted for it
I'm speechless.
The roll call vote is here.
Using their magic eraser, the Trump tax cuts will cost $0 going forward.
Words have a meaning, and Real Clear Politics wants you to think Donald Trump intimidated Senator Thom Tillis to disappear
Thom Tillis announces retirement from Senate after clash with Trump
The truth: ... The North Carolina Republican announced on Sunday that he would not seek reelection in the 2026 cycle. ...
Thom is still there, hopefully to vote Nay again today on Trump's big, ugly charade of a reconciliation bill, and will be there for eighteen more months, and there's not a damn thing Trump can do about it.
He will be a potent second potential Nay vote in the US Senate on everything with Rand Paul.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Republicans are doing an end-run around the Senate parliamentarian to make novel use of the current policy baseline instead of current law, asserting a Democrat precedent from 2022
Senate GOP declines to meet with parliamentarian on whether Trump tax cuts add to deficit
... Republicans, however, say that the parliamentarian doesn’t have a role in judging how much the tax portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add to the deficit within the bill’s 10-year budget window or whether it would add to deficits beyond 2034.
They argue that Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has authority under Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act “to determine baseline numbers of spending and revenue.”
Ryan Wrasse, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), pointed to a Budget Committee report published when Democrats were in the majority in 2022 stating that the Budget Committee, through its chair, makes the call on questions of numbers, not the parliamentarian.
Graham received a letter from Swagel [CBO Director] on Saturday stating that the Finance Committee’s tax text does not exceed its reconciliation instructions or add to deficits after 2034 when scored on the “current-policy” baseline that Graham wants the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and CBO to use.
Taylor Reidy, a spokesperson for the Budget panel, asserted on the social platform X that “there is no need to have a parliamentarian meeting with respect to current policy baseline because Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act gives Sen. Graham — as Chairman of the Budget Committee — the authority to set the baseline.” ...
All you really need to know is that whatever these yokels end up passing, the country will be $50-$60 trillion in debt ten years from now because they spend too much and tax too little.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina will not run again in 2026 after voting to stop Trump's reconciliation bill
Tillis won’t run for reelection in North Carolina
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Sunday announced he will not seek reelection to the Senate next year, firing a political shock wave into the midterm cycle after he said he would oppose President Trump’s mammoth tax package. ...
Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin folds like a house of cards, switches his Nay vote to Yea to advance reconciliation bill to the Senate floor for debate
Trump megabill narrowly advances in Senate despite two GOP defections
Senate Republicans on Saturday narrowly voted to advance a sprawling 1,000-page bill to enact President Trump’s agenda, despite the opposition of two GOP lawmakers.
The vote was 51-49.
Two Republicans voted against advancing the package: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes a provision to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who says the legislation would cost his state $38.9 trillion in federal Medicaid funding.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) changed his “no” vote to “aye,” and holdout Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) also voted yes to advance the bill.
The bill had suffered several significant setbacks in the days and hours before coming to the floor, at times appearing to be on shaky ground.
The vote itself was also full of drama. ...
Flashback to May 25 when Johnson said he had enough votes in the Senate to stop the bill:
GOP senator says resistance to Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' could stop it in the Senate
President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the "One Big, Beautiful Bill" passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator said there's enough resistance to halt the bill unless there are significant changes.
"The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, urging deeper spending cuts than those in the bill to reset to a "reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending."
"I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit," Johnson said. ...
Didn't even have him!
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
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. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline
The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017.
The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.
I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.
GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill
... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...
Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...
Friday, June 20, 2025
The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not
... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion.
Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense.
The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.
“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...
LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.
“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...
Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.
The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Five months in, the Trump administration still doesn't have spending under control with the fiscal year to date deficit running 13.5% higher than last year to this point
Deficit FY 2024 through May: $1.202 trillion
Deficit FY 2025 through May: $1.364 trillion
Difference: $162 billion MORE in the hole than last year at this time
I don't care what Elon Musk's DOGE claims, the May numbers from the US Department of the Treasury do not lie.
A tax increase was never more needed.
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