Imagine you and your family have a budget, and you set aside money every month to lease a car. At the end of the lease, the dealer calls you up and agrees to extend the deal for another year.
“Great news,” you tell your family. “Since we’ve already been making monthly payments on the lease, I’ve decided that the extension means that the car is now free.”
At this point, your loved ones would probably give you quizzical looks — and for good reason, since budgets don’t actually work this way. But as The Wall Street Journal reported, this is roughly the same reasoning Republicans are embracing when coming up with a price tag for the tax breaks in their GOP megabill, the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday.
“Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before — deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained on the Senate floor during the debate over the GOP’s reconciliation package.
When Republicans first approved massive tax breaks for the wealthy in 2017, they helped obscure the cost by giving the tax cuts an expiration date. Eight years later, the bill has come due, and many of these policies from Donald Trump’s first term are poised to expire. (The president likely assumed he’d be out of office by 2025, and this would be someone else’s problem. Instead, it’s his own problem.)
Traditionally, GOP officials have tried to pretend that tax cuts are free because they pay for themselves. That absurdity has repeatedly been debunked, but in the current debate, Republicans are pushing a different line: Tax cuts are free, the party is insisting, if they’re already in place.
They’ve even given this assumption a benign-sounding name: Republicans are referring to this as the “current policy baseline.” The party realizes that the existing budget policy is based on assumptions that the 2017 tax cuts will expire on time, and changing those assumptions by making the tax breaks permanent adds trillions of dollars to the debt, but GOP lawmakers are simply pretending otherwise, embracing an accounting gimmick without precedent in the American tradition.
Pressed for some kind of explanation, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham told reporters last week, “I’m the king of the numbers.” Half-joking, the South Carolina Republican added, “I’m Zeus, the budget king.”
At this point, some readers might be asking, “Won’t the Senate parliamentarian’s office have a problem with this?” The answer is almost certainly yes, which is why Senate Republicans have decided not to allow the Senate parliamentarian’s office to consider the question. Indeed, GOP senators have explicitly argued that they’re satisfied with their own manufactured answer to the underlying question, so there’s “no need” for any additional scrutiny about the permissibility of their gambit. “There is nothing to debate, and we consider this matter settled,” a Budget Committee spokesperson said over the weekend. This position was endorsed by the Senate itself in a 53-47 vote on Monday morning. The result is an inherently ridiculous dynamic: There will be one set of numbers rooted in arithmetic and used by the Congressional Budget Office, and there will be a rival set of numbers based on a Republican twist on arithmetic. The New York Times reported that Democrats now believe that the Republican strategy “ultimately weakens the filibuster in the Senate and opens the door to Democrats, too, passing more expensive policies through the process in the future.” Indeed, NBC News’ Sahil Kapur noted via Bluesky that Democrats, in theory, could use the same approach to approve a Medicare-for-all bill for one year, at which point they could declare that all future years are free, all while operating under the same rules that Republicans now see as legitimate.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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