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 Parliamentarian Comes for the Beautiful Bill

David Dayen, American Prospect

 

A couple dozen provisions have been removed. No ruling yet on the biggest one, which could mean $3.7 trillion in fake ‘savings.’

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. 

Mark Levin is right, can't understand why Trump is throwing Iran's Nazi leader a lifeline

 Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.

Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.

More.

Yeah, what a hero Trump is, they should give him the Nobel Peace Prize

 From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:

Dramatic Day of Diplomacy Culminates in Iran-Israel Ceasefire

Atwood, et al., CNN

 

Trump's Courageous Leadership 

Miranda Devine, New York Post

 

 Trump's Strategy Opens a Path to Toning Down the Conflict

Akbar Ahmed, HuffPost

 

If Ceasefire Happens It Would Be Massive Win for Trump

Chris Cuomo, NewsNation

 

President Trump Looks Judicious and Pragmatic

Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal

Ceasefire schmeesefire

 

Iran is now but a shadow of its former self

 Iran's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Islamist suicide bombers kill at least 20 Christians, wound many more, during mass in Damascus church a day after the U.S. attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment sites

 

At the Mar Elias Church in the Dweila neighborhood of Syria's capital Damascus on Sunday.

Mouth-breather Marco: By the time we left we were already gone lol

 He could be our Yogi Berra redivivus, but just hasn't got the C H A R M.

 

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. ...

It's a good thing

 

The truth is buried in the very last paragraph: Obama's war on coal did this to us

Why electricity prices are surging for U.S. households

... certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online ...

Trump's been giving Putin two weeks to prove he's serious about peace with Ukraine for two months

 

The example most detrimental to U.S. and U.S. presidential stature is Two Weeks Trump's ridiculous coddling of Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine for two months

 

 ... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.

On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.

Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."

Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.

"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...

Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump. 

It's been two months, not two weeks.

More. 

Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is

 

 Who's the Mad King Now?:

... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...

Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”

He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...

“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”

The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not

 

In race to attract data centers, states forfeit hundreds of millions in tax revenue to tech firms

 

... 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.    

It ain't over, but 3 judge panel of Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals votes unanimously to let Trump keep control of California National Guard troops

 Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles

 

 ... In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised his authority in federalizing control of the guard.

It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...

So, a White House official supposedly told FOX News that use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuke facilities is not off the table

 The idiot who did this map didn't know that B-2 Spirit Bombers are based at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri.

Also, the idiot from the White House should be an ex-official. 

The 4-week moving average of continued claims for unemployment also popped to the highest level since November 2021

 

The 4-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment popped close to 250k again, as in the summer of 2023

 

These guys want to talk about the 802k foreign born who left in April, not about the 1.6m who arrived in January lol

 

Center For Immigration Studies Estimates One Million Illegal Aliens Left U.S. In First Half Of 2025

 

There is nothing remarkable about the recent decline in foreign born population in comparison with the immediate past under Biden, when 945k left in April 2024 and 896k left in June 2023.

 

The numbers are noisy if nothing else, and go back only to January 2007. 

That said, the January surge is probably more about the revisions of the data for the previous year than about anything else. 

 

About 6.1 million foreign born entered the country in 2021 through 2024 in this data, after about 629k left in 2020. In 2025 through May, about 849k have left, but May is notably flat from April.

 

You could just as easily say the May numbers indicate Trump's policies have been a complete failure. 

 

I would be more sanguine about attributing an exodus of foreign born to the new Trump policies if the leavers were much larger in number than recently, but they are not. 

 

In my book, Trump needs to get the foreign born population back down to 43.5 million, his 2019 peak. Anything less is not a victory. 

 

 

 

Ted Cruz reminds everyone Tucker Carlson used to be for the annihilation of Iran in 2012 when Mr. My Muslim Faith was in charge lol