Has There Ever Been This Much Lying About A Budget Bill?

Not that I remember.

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Joe Isuzu. This was an ad campaign in which a car company admitted to viewers that its comically mendacious spokesperson was lying to them. The 1980s zeitgeist is difficult to explain today.

In 2017 a Republican-majority Congress said the Trump tax cuts (excepting the corporate tax cut) would expire at the end of 2025. It said that because if it had been honest about intending to extend the tax cuts beyond 2025, the loss to the Treasury would have exceeded limits set by Senate rules. Now, to make it look like the “Big, Beautiful Bill” won’t add another $3.3 trillion to the deficit, thereby more than doubling it, the Senate has adopted a “current policy” accounting scheme that assumes tax cuts never expire. That amounts to saying, “Whenever we Republicans say a tax cut will expire, we will always be full of shit.” Including, I guess, now, when they say that a new expansion of the regressive deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), achieved by raising the ceiling from $10,000 to $40,000, will expire in five years. If you believe that I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

My latest for The New Republic catalogs the unusual quantity of lies surrounding the budget reconciliation bill as it moves toward final passage in the Senate. You can read it here.