1 week Ago By Post Editorial Board
It took some last-minute assurances from Speaker Mike Johnson , but the House on Thursday voted to move ahead with the “big, beautiful bill” — a measure to renew the 2017 tax cuts, lift the debt ceiling, up national-security spending and cut other outlays to avoid goosing the deficit. Now comes the hard part of spelling out the cuts and pinning down the final tax package — and getting 214 House and 50 Senate Republicans to sign off on all the “reconciliation” details. We complain plenty about the House Freedom Caucus, but its members have good reason to push hard for seriously reining in federal spending: It’s the growth in outlays, not a falloff in Uncle Sam’s tax take, that has seen deficits skyrocket.
And the vested interests’ allergy to any efficiencies has been on display in the apocalyptic fury over DOGE’s work : Did you notice how a bunch of federal workers returned to their agencies the other day — not to work, but for a protest against return-to-office orders? And of course Democrats will scream “savage cuts!” when the feds crack down on states like New York and California’s outrageous gaming of Medicaid’s reimbursement rules. But if the Trump tax cuts expire, it’s horrible news for the US economy — on a scale many times the size of the now-suspended “reciprocal tariffs” that prompted so much market panic. Republicans in Congress have their work cut out for them — but, as Ben Franklin once observed, if they don’t hang together, they’ll hang separately.
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