My guest today is Catherine Rampell. She’s an economics columnist at The Washington Post, an anchor at MSNBC, and she’s been covering this closely. And I’ve asked her to come on the show today to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings and what it will really mean for people’s lives. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Catherine Rampell, welcome to the show. Great to join you. So this big, beautiful bill, big beautiful budget, it is really quite big. There’s a lot in it. If you could only tell people about three or four of its parts, what would they be. I think I would say it is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past. Walk me through that. So it has a lot of big bundles of parts in it, which normally we would have more time to digest piecemeal, but those include big tax cuts, which are generally quite regressive. They help higher income people more. They are. It also includes big cuts to the safety net, particularly Medicaid and SNAP, otherwiss known as food stamps. And it includes basically eliminating a bunch of climate related tax credits, which are investments in the future, as well as cutting programs that disproportionately help children, which I would also say help robs robs our future and will still cost a lot of money, which leaves the bill due to future generations of taxpayers. And how big is that Bill. Depends on how you calculate it. There are a bunch of competing estimates out there, but over 10 years, it’s somewhere around $4 trillion. And before the negotiations are done, it may well be more than that, because there are a bunch of Republicans who want even more tax cuts. You and I are both battle scarred veterans of the 2010 budget fights. Oh, Yes. And I think those fights, when we were constantly being told by Republicans that we were about to become Greece and needed immediate austerity, and then in fact, interest rates were completely fine for years and years soured a lot of people on warnings about the debt. But we’re in a pretty different interest rate environment now, so interest rates are a lot higher. And the payments have gotten pretty serious. So interest payments are currently the second highest expenditure in the federal budget. It’s more than our entire national defense spend. Adding a bunch more debt on top of that seems a little dangerous. How do you think about the debt burden we’re facing down here. What’s that expression. Something that can’t go on forever. Won’t I think that’s kind of where we are in that we cannot continue to sustain this level of deficit spending without at some point, you would think bond investors revolting and needing to as our political leaders, needing to either cut spending or raise taxes or both. But when that actually happens, I have no idea. It might be in depending on where Trump is headed to. Trump is doing other things to call into question the safety or risk free of the US dollar and US debt. So well, setting that aside, this is what worries me. So I’m used to doing budget coverage, and you tend to sit-in the confines of the budget. You’re worried about this provision, that provision. But there’s this interaction effect between what Trump is doing elsewhere, the tariffs, the trade war with China. We have seen bond markets shake recently under various fears and then piling on a huge amount of New debt in this budget. If it passes and we have this world where we have much higher interest rates, I think the Trump administration would like to see interest rates come down. Oh they have. Trump has made that more than clear, more than clear. But passing a budget like this makes it a lot harder for the Fed to bring down interest rates. Yes well, a lot of things that the Trump administration is doing will make it harder to reduce interest rates. One of which is adding a lot more debt piled onto the existing debt that we already have. Some of it has to do with the fact that tariffs are likely to increase prices. All of these things are coming together to make it more likely that rates either go up or at least don’t come down as much as certainly anyone looking for a house would like them to be. I know this all gets wonky to try to plug the weird and I think, dangerous budget into the other parts of the Trump administration’s economic theory. But I want to try to do it for a minute, because we’ve just spent months covering the tariffs. And the theory behind the tariffs. And on some level, the theory behind the tariffs is this that trade deficits are bad. And this world where what’s happening is that the rest of the world keeps giving us money and we keep taking in all of their investment. And that has effects on the dollar and effects on our manufacturing. And the Trump administration wants that on some level, to stop. They believe America has been ripped off by selling so many financial products in order to buy goods. Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense though. Well, yeah, I agree. That’s one of the problems with this administration. It doesn’t make any sense. And I think Scott Bessent is smart enough to know that it has been to our advantage that other countries, or private individuals around the world want our treasuries, because it has enabled us to continue borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, and not have to make the politically difficult decisions to either raise taxes or cut benefits, so I don’t. It sounds like you think that the administration wants people to stop buying our debt. Is that what. Is that your theory of the case. I think that they believe that this world in which our financial products are so unbelievably attractive, and we are buying so much from the world and giving them our money, and they take our debt in that it’s a bad world, and they want to shift the balance of trade and inflows and outflows. And that’s what the tariffs are largely about. And that they’re doing this at this moment when they’re going to pile on a bunch of debt. I think what’s happening here is that Trump decided he likes tariffs, and everybody around him scrambles to reverse engineer a justification for it that I don’t disagree with. I don’t think that there’s any strategic like anybody is thinking, Yes, we need to have more tariffs in order to have more manufacturing in order to have the rest of the world not buying our debt, because everything Trump wants to do will increase the debt. So I am not arguing there’s not a contradiction. What I’m saying is we’re doing both of these things and they are putting on a bunch of tariffs. Yes And they are making us less trustworthy place to invest. And then on the other hand, they’re going to radically increase our debt and the need to have the world keep buying it and these two things together, making America a both less welcoming place for that kind of endless purchasing of our debt and making America a less trustworthy place to purchase debt and making America a place that needs to sell ever more debt seems like a recipe for things to go very badly wrong Absolutely At some unknown point in the future. Yes, I 100 percent agree with that. That is where I’m going with all this. I 100 percent agree with all of that. But I don’t think that any of this is deliberate. I think Trump is convinced that the bill won’t cost anything. People like Scott Bessent have told him it’s going to supercharge growth and we’ll grow our way out of debt. And then we don’t have to worry about whether there’s appetite out there to buy more treasuries. Do you buy that. The tax cuts we’re seeing in this bill will lead to a lot of growth we would not have otherwise had. I think that it will stimulate demand somewhat in the near term. If people’s taxes go down, they have more money to spend on other things. We saw that last time. So there’ll be some supply side effects, some demand side effects, but not enough to overcome all of the other reasons why this is slowing the economy. So like I was talking with this guy who was the CEO of a Christmas tree company, Balsam Hill, they sell artificial Christmas trees from China. And I was asking like, so Trump says he’s going to help you in the long run by cutting your taxes. And he said, we ran the numbers. And if they cut their taxes on their profits by half, that would offset a 2 percent increase in tariffs. So it’s just like the numbers don’t add up, particularly for industries that are really exposed to the tariffs. But in general like for the macro economy no these things are not going to fully pay for themselves, even if there is a tiny grain of truth to the idea that they could stimulate the economy, at least in the near term. So I just I think you’re again, I think in some ways, it sounds like you’re giving them too much credit. Like, I don’t think it’s as strategic as you make it out to be, but the bad outcome. You described. Yeah, I think Yes. I don’t hugely care what they think they’re doing. O.K fair enough. I care what they’re doing. Yes, I agree that all of their different arguments for things are contradictory. Yes And don’t cross domains that there’s no macro theory of the case. Yes But they are doing all these things. And that seems like a huge risk that is building up beneath the system to me. Yes, I agree with that. And again, this Moody’s announcement I think is. Yeah do you want to describe what happened there. So there are basically three main ratings agencies. And for a very, very long time, the Uc debt was rated by all of these ratings agencies as pristine risk free. The gold stars all around triple A’s is what they called it. And then over the last 10 to 15 years, ratings agencies started knocking us down a peg and saying maybe they’re not as good for their word as they seem to be. Including because there was a debt ceiling debacle where it looked like we might default on our debt, et cetera. More recently, the last holdout, Moody’s, which I think had not downgraded US in over 100 years, or we’ve had a perfect rating for them for over 100 years. Moody’s basically said, yeah, we don’t think these guys are quite as 100 percent good for their money as we once thought, because the US, US deficits have already been on track to be growing and growing and growing. And now, with the likely passage of this additional big, beautiful bill. That problem is only going to get worse. So it doesn’t really mean anything per se, it’s more symbolic. It is more like yet another scolding from the financial markets in a way that lawmakers are acting irresponsibly. And you had a bunch of debt. It matters what you’re adding the debt for. In this case, we’re adding it to extend the Tax Cuts passed in 2017, and then add a bunch of New tax cuts on top of it Yes How do you describe the total tax cut package here. What is it trying to do. What should we who is it benefiting. What’s your gloss on it. So overall most Americans will get a tax cut. I think a lot of the talking points are or relative to again relative to what they would have had if no bill had passed, because a lot of the tax code is expiring and people’s taxes would have otherwise gone up. So when you hear talking points like these are only tax cuts for billionaires or corporations or whatever. That’s not quite true. I think I looked this up before we met, but basically 94 percent of Americans will get some tax cut relative to what would have happened if Congress does nothing. But the very biggest benefits definitely go to higher income classes like Family. This is from the Tax Policy Center. 2/3 of the plan’s tax cuts by dollar value go to those in the top quintile. People in the top 1 percent about a quarter of the Tax Cuts. So that’s people making over $1 million. Basically they get about a quarter of the benefits. And then if you look at the overall bill, it’s not only that the rich benefit more. It’s that the poor come out behind because to the extent that any of this is paid for at all, it’s largely paid for by taking other benefits away from low income people. Like what benefits. Medicaid and food stamps are the biggies here. Medicaid currently enrolls something like one in five Americans. It’s a huge program. It’s a popular program. And Republicans have argued that their changes are only about kicking off the freeloaders and apocryphal welfare Queens. And will make sure that everyone who is deserving of this public health insurance program continues to receive it. But if you actually look at the provisions themselves, that seems very unlikely. I want to stay on the Medicaid side of this for a minute. One of the big ways we’re trying to save money in Medicaid without saying what they’re doing is cutting. It is what’s called work requirements. And the theory of work requirements is we make you prove that if you’re an able-bodied person, that you have worked more than 80 hours or you are looking for work in some kind of intense way, and if you can’t prove that you lose your Medicaid because if you’re going to get the benefit of Medicaid, you should show the responsibility of either working or looking for work. The problem is, and my partner, Annie Lowery, has talked about this, is that the time tax and written about this kind of administrative complexity a lot. We make it so hard to do and to prove that huge numbers of people lose coverage through being unable to complete the paperwork. And so you’re weaponizing time and bureaucratic complexity to deny people a benefit they are supposed to have. So how much of the Medicaid cut is built around that. So a lot of it. And I actually did a lot of on the ground reporting about a pilot version of this back in 2018, 2019, in Arkansas, where the Trump administration allowed Arkansas to impose work requirements. And I’ll say a few things. So the first thing is like this is a very popular actually provision, something like 62 percent of Americans like the idea of Medicaid work requirements, including about half of Democrats. So it’s because it sounds reasonable. Why shouldn’t people have to show that they are productive members of society in order to receive these government benefits. But it’s not really clear, what problem it’s trying to solve in that almost 2/3 of people who are on Medicaid are working. They’re working either part time or full time, and the remainder who are not working Have something that is generally considered like an allowable excuse, meaning that they are a full time caregiver, they’re enrolled in school, they have a disability, et cetera it’s only a very tiny slice of people who don’t have one of these, exclusions, one of these exemptions that’s spelled out. So in Arkansas, most of the people, something like 18,000 people, lost their Medicaid within the span of a few months. Most of those people were kicked off of Medicaid, not because they were shown to have not been working or have one of these other allowable exemptions, but for administrative reasons, basically, they didn’t fill out the paperwork or they didn’t fill it out sufficiently. There was one guy that I profiled, Adrian McGonigal, who actually was working at a chicken plant, and he got confused about how to report his hours. It was like, not mobile friendly. The website literally shut down after, I think o’clock every day. I don’t know. The hamsters had to go to bed or something. And he didn’t have access to a computer. He only had his phone. And he thought he did it once and that was sufficient. Anyway, he lost his health coverage. He had severe COPD because he was not able to get his medications and to treat this chronic illness. He ended up getting very sick, lost his job at the chicken plant. And so this policy that was sold as encouraging people to get jobs actually cost him his. He unfortunately passed away quite recently as I learned, I got in touch with his former legal aid attorney who had said that ultimately, Adrian had been one of the plaintiffs in the case to challenge this law and did get it overturned. And he was able to get his Medicaid back. But he kind of went into this downward financial and health spiral as a result of all of this. So these things have consequences. And there are long term harms that are created by what seems like reasonable paperwork to some people. But the reality is that this is a backdoor way of basically purging people from their health insurance. Again, to take it back to the Congressional Budget Office, that is their assumption as well. The Congressional Budget Office says, Yes, this will save a lot of money and a lot of people will lose health insurance. There will be no change on employment. That is what their assumption is. This policy that, again, is supposed to be about making sure only the deserving people get jobs, and encouraging more people to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps will actually have no effect on how many people have jobs. That’s pretty grim. Yes, and it saves a lot of their money, actually, which implies that a lot of people are losing coverage through these paperwork requirements. Yes And I just think this is ugly. If you want to argue that people shouldn’t have health care, fine. If you want to argue that people should have jobs, we could have all kinds of labor market policies that help people get jobs. None of which are in this bill, none of which are in this bill. But for the administration that did DOGE to add a huge layer of bureaucratic complexity, how good will the other languages of this paperwork be. How good. How quick will the response times in these agencies. Will the website shut down after a website shut down after 9:00 PM. It really reveals something, both an unwillingness. I mean, Trump has promised not to cut Medicaid. An unwillingness to stand up for what they’re actually doing. And then an effort to weaponize the very bureaucratic inefficiency that they otherwise pretend to condemn and root out against the weakest and most powerless segment of society, people who do not make enough money to get health insurance. Yeah and there are a bunch of the whole thing just it actually turns my stomach. Yeah, there’s a bunch of other red tape that they add. They require that people on Medicaid have to reprove eligibility more frequently, which, again, if the process were completely seamless, who cares. But it’s not every time people have to reprove eligibility, even if nothing has changed in their situation. There’s a chance the paperwork gets lost. People have to find the time to go to the office, to deliver the forms in person, or they have to navigate this clunky website or whatever. It’s just a matter of like hacking through all of this red tape American Ninja style. That’s how I picture it. It’s an obstacle course, essentially, that they’ve set up for people to make it harder for them to prove that they are entitled to the benefits that they are legally entitled to. Then there are about $300 billion in cuts to snap, which is the modern term for the food stamps program. And there’s also a lot of this bill is about extending tax cuts from the past. Yes but right now there are these subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that were passed under the Biden administration, which have made the premiums in the Affordable Care Act much cheaper. They’ve led to a pretty big increase in the number of people enrolled. And one of the payfors in the bill is to allow those to expire. Do you mind talking a bit about how that will work. Yes so understandably, there’s been a lot of focus on Medicaid. There are other provisions, either in the bill or part of the broader Republican agenda, that will also end up with people losing their health insurance. There are these expanded subsidies, essentially, for people to buy insurance on the individual marketplace that have partly been responsible for the fact that the uninsured rate in America, I think, was at its lowest level on record last year. It’s partly because of Medicaid expansion. It’s partly because of this. And it’s like technical and wonky, and people don’t really pay attention to it. But those expanded subsidies were passed by Democrats and were set are set to expire at the end of this year. Republicans could choose to extend those just as they are extending a lot of other things on the tax side. That extension costs no money. But they have chosen not to. So when you see these scarier figures for how many people are going to newly become uninsured from the cbo? Over 13 million people that is inclusive of Medicaid changes to the Affordable Care Act and some other regulatory stuff that basically Congress is codifying. So I just want to put a very fine point on this. According to our best read of what the bill is going to do, we are going to drive 13 million people off health insurance. Yes, we are going to end $300 billion of spending that gives food to hungry people. And that is going to go to pay for, depending on how you calculate it, roughly a quarter of tax cuts goes to the top 1 percent Like that’s the fundamental math of this bill. Yes, that is the fundamental math of this bill. And this is part of the reason why among others, have characterized it as a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich because it is forcing low income people who would otherwise have access to these safety net benefits that have been around and been popular for many decades Among Republicans, including among Senator Josh Hawley, has been saying, well, yeah, I mean, just as an aside, there are Republicans in the House who very narrowly won their elections last year by fewer votes than the number of people who are on Medicaid in their districts. So yeah, politically, besides the human cost of all of this politically, it seems pretty dumb to me because while there is maybe a stereotype of who is the typical food stamp recipient or the typical Medicaid recipient, a stereotype that’s racialized, among other things, people from all walks of life go through periods where they need this assistance. Many of them are Republicans. Many of them live in districts that are currently represented by Republicans. And at some point, people are going to notice when they can’t put food on the table or they can’t get their kid. It used to be the case in American politics that Democrats won voters who made less than $50,000 by a lot, and Republicans won voters who made more than $100,000 by a lot. And so we used to have these fights or the safety net, but they somewhat aligned with the political coalitions. Republicans wanted to cut benefits like this, but mostly those were not their voters. In 2024, Donald Trump won. Voters making less than $50,000 wasn’t a huge victory among them, but he won them. Donald Trump won voters who did not go to college. When you look at who is on Medicaid, when you look at who is on food stamps, when you look at who needs expanded health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, it is concentrated in this group of voters who thought Trump was going to make their cost of living cheaper, and who are also now paying for them. Yes And higher tariffs. There are many ways in which this administration and allies in Congress have run a pretty regressive agenda, not looking out for the common man, shall we say. I mean, we haven’t even talked about some of the other DOJ’s cuts recently closing half of the regional head start offices. Head Start is the program that serves low income families by providing pre-K and child care and other ancillary services for the parents. My question will be, at what point do Americans necessarily connect the dots. I think with tariffs, people understand the tariffs are happening. Some of these other connections, I think are a little bit more opaque. And some of that is. Of necessity. And some of it, I think is by design. One one of my most deeply held political beliefs is that complexity rewards demagogues. And this bill is definitely a case in point. Like budgets are always complicated and make people’s eyes glaze over, but normally journalists have some time to digest what’s in it and help people understand how it might affect them. Instead, all of this stuff is being dumped at once, so it’s very easy to lie about Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are just looking out for you and are going to make you rich and are going to kick off all of those freeloaders and welfare Queens from programs so that you get them and they don’t. And it’s an easier story to tell the more opaque the actual policies are. It’s why I’ve thought a fight happening as we speak and we don’t know how to resolve yet is interesting. So the bill, as initially written, has the work requirements come into play in 2029 after the next presidential election. So they get to pocket. These assumed savings because do budget numbers over 10 years. But in theory, nobody will feel the thing they are doing to Medicaid until 2029, or at least that thing they are doing to Medicaid. But the more right wing members of their caucus want that brought up to 2026, in which case people would begin to feel it immediately within this term, such that it could be something that people are upset about come the next presidential election. Again, we don’t know how it’ll play out, but I thought it was quite telling that the Republican majorities preference, not their more Freedom Caucus minority was let’s put this in the bill, but make it the next president’s problem, because you can lie about things until you’re thrown off of Medicaid and a bunch of people. Are thrown off of Medicaid. And then what just happened comes clear real quickly. Yes well, there’s this fundamental tension within the Republican caucus, as you pointed out, between members who think that the provisions are not heartless enough and those who think that they are too heartless in the political sense, I guess, in that the people on the Budget Committee we I should say, when we’re recording this, we don’t know what concessions were given to them as yet in order to get the bill out of committee. But the people who voted against it initially said that they wanted these Medicaid work requirements to be moved up. They wanted more of the climate related tax credits to be rescinded, et cetera. But then there are a lot of other members of the party who were very worried about exactly the political risk. You identified that people will realize they’ve been kicked off of these benefits and will take their anger justified anger out on the Republican Party and whoever is on the Republican ticket. And this is a problem not only in the House, but it’s a problem in the Senate. I think you mentioned Josh Hawley has talked about this. Hawley seems to be against Medicaid cuts at high levels altogether. And he’s making the argument that I just alluded to. We are now a working class party. It is our voters on Medicaid. Yes cutting Medicaid for our voters. Well, and there’s also some disagreement in the party about whether to even call these Medicaid cuts right. I think there’s not disagreement. They don’t want to call them Medicaid cuts. Yes sure. Fair but they might play stupid, but they’re not idiots. Yeah Yes. Fair they know they’re saving money and that when you save money on Medicaid, what just happened is somebody somewhere did not get health care. But they are spinning it as it’s only the undeserving people who won’t get health care. The people who are lazy, who are freeloaders, who are government parasites and can’t get their butt to work. But what Josh Hawley is saying, what Josh Hawley is saying is, look, guys, we can’t be believing our own spin. Yes we can’t get high on our own supply. We can’t get high on our own supply. If we do this, we are cutting Medicaid for our voters. And what I’m saying is, the people writing this bill know what they’re doing. Yes they are not confused about what is happening. When you cut Medicaid in this way, they know that people are the only way. This saves money or the main way this saves money is people who otherwise could have walked into a hospital or a doctor’s office and put down a Medicaid card and gotten health care coverage that the government would have paid for, cannot do that. That’s the mechanism. Yes, I agree with that. I mean, there are a lot of contradictory things. Yes I just don’t want to allow their spin to stand on this show. That’s fair. That’s a totally reasonable point. Yes so there are members of the Republican conference who want these Medicaid cuts to kick in faster. There are members who want them to kick in more slowly, or maybe not at all, because they understand that it is their voters who may suffer. There are members of the party who don’t want to raise deficits. There are members of the party who think that deficits don’t matter. There are just like part of the issue here. And part of the reason why I have been really wondering, where does this bill actually go is that there are so many mutually exclusive constraints in a party that has a very thin margin, that it’s hard to know who gets To extract what demands in exchange for their vote because, we haven’t really talked about Republicans who are in the salt caucus, who want basically bigger tax cuts for rich people by allowing people in blue state, predominantly blue states, to deduct more of their state and local taxes. And they may be the defining. It seems like the people who are worried about Medicaid cuts hurting their own constituents, they’ve gotten a little quieter recently. The salt caucus is now louder. So maybe they’re the ones who get to twist the bill in their direction, but then going to cost even more. And what do you do about be more regressive and be more regressive, and you end up having the bill cost more. Do you end up kicking even more people off of benefits. I don’t know these puzzle pieces just don’t fit together. I was going to say that the thing here is that the only thing holding the coalition together is fear of Donald Trump himself, that House Republicans, Senate Republicans, whatever they think on most policies, very few of them will dare oppose him. Except there is this one thing that happened. Oh, I know what you’re going to say, which is that Donald Trump had exactly one good political instinct here. And he said, maybe one of the ways we should pay for this is we should raise taxes on really wealthy people, and not by a ton, but maybe just enough to say we’re doing it. Yeah what happened to that. This was one of the few times I think I’ve seen his friends and allies in Congress visibly recoil. And many of them said publicly yeah, that’s not a good idea. And so Trump then posted on social media, well, I think they should do it, but it’s probably a bad idea. So I understand if they don’t. This is one of the few times I feel like I’ve seen Donald Trump back down in one of these fights. And it’s clear that this was in the no fly zone. It was just interesting to see this vestigial reflex of the Republican Party, as I understood it, to exist in 2013, kick in. And the one thing Donald Trump cannot do as he tries to build his working class multiracial coalition, is the most popular policy move in his arsenal for a bill like this, which is to pay for some of your tax cuts. Well, you said raising taxes on rich people. Well, you said the one thing that holds the Republican Party together is fealty to Trump. I think it’s fealty to Trump and tax cuts, particularly regressive tax cuts. This has been their North Star for many, many years. And it does not surprise me that that’s their one red line with this guy is that we cannot raise taxes on higher income people and corporations. So Donald Trump wins the election, running against the high prices of the Biden era. And he walks into an economy where inflation has calmed down. Things are pretty steady and stable. Stock market’s in good shape. And then he begins raising prices through tariffs. And the tariffs are bouncing around a lot right now. We’re on a reduced level with China for 90 days as we negotiate only 30 percent a mere 30 percent Yes but there are tariffs. Now on all kinds of goods coming from all over the world. Those price increases are starting to show up, are going to continue showing up. There’s also a huge amount of uncertainty causing all kinds of business investment, because when you don’t know what the tariff rate or tax structure will be from day to day, you’re not going to make a bunch of long term capital investments. Yep so every forecaster says that the risk of recession has been rising from what they anticipated it would be at the beginning of the year. Now, a bill like this where we’re doing things like cutting snap, cutting Medicaid, cutting the Affordable Care Act. How do those two things interact. I think it’s never really a great time to kick a lot of people off of critical benefits like Medicaid and SNAP, but probably the worst time is when we are about to head into a recession, because that’s when people are most likely to need these programs and they automatically kick in. And so there’s a little bit of it’s the safety. That’s what the safety net is right. It’s to catch people when they might otherwise be falling to help them get back on their feet. These programs also because they kick in automatically, they’re thinking they’re thought of as automatically stabilizing the overall economy. Because if all of these people who were losing their jobs at once stopped spending it once, that’s going to lead to a downward spiral. They stop spending the places that they would spend their money, stop hiring, lay off people. Et cetera. Et cetera. But it’s effectively like an automatic form of stimulus and helps the economy recover a little faster. If instead, you have these things coinciding at once, where we have a recession on the one hand, and these massive changes to programs like food stamps and Medicaid, then you will have not only greater suffering among individuals in the near term, but potentially a deeper and longer recession. And look, I don’t think a recession is a Fait accompli. I don’t want to suggest that it’s definitely going to happen, but the odds have increased and all of these agenda items are conspiring to make life a lot more difficult, whether intentionally or otherwise, a lot more difficult for the most vulnerable Americans, because, again, the tariffs will also increase the prices of the things that they buy. So yeah, it’s like it’s the perfect storm. So Republicans will tell you that this whole conversation is unfair, that we’re ignoring all the ways in this bill that they are expanding help for the working class. So there is a somewhat complicated approach to expanding the child tax credit. There are things like no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. Time talk to me about this set of policies, the more populist dimensions of this bill. So I don’t think they’re uniformly bad. All of the things that you just mentioned. I do think that we should be doing something to make more assistance available to families with kids, for example. But the way that they have structured these changes is still not really targeting those who need it. So just as an example, the no tax on tips thing, it sounds like that would help your typical waitress or other hospitality worker. In reality, those people are probably low income enough that they’re not going to benefit from this because their income is below the threshold where they would get taxed much anyway, whether that income is coming from tips or from wages. The people who are going to benefit are going to be the people who are disproportionately high income, who can maybe reclassify more of their income as tips or as overtime. So this is going to be like a big boondoggle for accountants and tax attorneys. And we’ve got the IRS and we’ve got the IRS on tax shenanigans are going down. So this is not structured in such a way that it will actually help the people that I think are being envisioned. When you think about tipped workers or you think about people who need overtime pay, they are probably going to see very little benefit, or at least relative to where the dollars are actually going to be flowing. It’s primarily going to help higher income people. The same thing with social cutting or eliminating taxes on Social Security. Most people under current law, who are low income already are not paying taxes on Social Security. The people who are left out of the current system, who would be exempt, are disproportionately higher income because of how the law currently works. So a lot of these things that sound populist on their face are either symbolic or actually going to be regressive, and it will also distort a lot of behavior, too. Like I should tell the Washington Post to just pay me 100 percent in tips. And then all of my income will be tax free. One of the other ways they’re trying to pay for part of this is gutting various tax credits to incentivize clean energy that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. This is another part of the bill under active negotiation. The right wing of the Republican Party wants to make the evisceration of these tax cuts quite complete. The bill, as it is currently written, just makes it profound. This is why I put it. But solar credits. Wind credits. Tax cuts for electric vehicles. Nuclear which in general, one tends to think about the Republican Party supporting putting aside even what you think about climate change. These were fast growing our fast Growing American industries. And they are industries we don’t want to lose to China. We have big tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles for a reason. Donald Trump has wanted to bring down American energy prices and wants American energy dominance. These are things that generate energy and contribute to an overall capacity. How do you think about what this will mean just for the energy prices and the industries behind them. Well, in a lot of the investments have to date been concentrated in red districts as well. I mean, my general view on so-called clean energy. Green energy. Whatever term you want to use is that the transition is coming. No matter what. Just because the economics in the long run make much more sense for to electrify everything and to use solar and wind and other renewables as much as possible because on the margin, sunshine and wind are free and fossil fuels are not. So it’s going to win in the long run. The question is only how quickly. And politicians can do things to either speed it up or slow it down. And if they slow it down, that means we are just delaying the time until we get the really, really cheap. Not to mention cleaner and more renewable energy. And raising costs effectively in the near term. But it does something else too, which is that there is a race to have the dominant corporate players in what will be globally important export industries. That’s also true. I mean, as you say, there’s a transition going on. It’s probably going to happen one way or the other. And China, who we are obsessed with, competing with and for reasonable reasons, they’ve pumped a huge amount of money into trying to dominate solar technology, trying to dominate wind technology, battery technology, EVs. So putting aside again what you think of renewable energy, and my opinions on it are exactly what one would think they are. This is a gigantic gift to China, where their electric vehicle industry is already quite globally competitive. We are keeping those cars out for a reason. We worry if they come in, they would beat the cars we are making. But now nobody likes Tesla in Europe and we nobody like liberals, don’t like Tesla in America. Increasingly, and we are cutting the knees out of our other electric vehicle companies which are using these kinds of credits to catch up and to be really good at solar, wind, and nuclear. You got to fund it. And we’re going to stop doing that too. Just from their industrial policy strategy, this just seems disastrous for us. Yes, I generally agree with that. I mean, I think I am more skeptical of industrial policy more generally than you are. And I thought that the tariffs we placed on not just Chinese solar but global solar back in whatever it was 2018 and then extended under Biden. I thought those were dumb. Like if other countries want to sell US solar on the cheap, let them like let us have clean, let us have cheap, clean energy. We don’t disagree on this. And I agree with you that this set of policies is, again, somewhat at odds with Trump’s general pro manufacturing Renaissance agenda. Like, why are we talking about bringing back sneaker factories. And maybe doll factories. At this point, I’m not really sure. Like very low value items. If we are going to use industrial policy to try to revive or invest in some segment of the manufacturing industry, we should be doing it for these goods of the future. So this gets to another form of redistribution that you brought up at the beginning. And I wanted to end on, which is the redistribution from the young to the old. And there’s a way that the climate side does this very directly. If we are slowing down that transition, volatile climate are going to experience more harm from that. But you’re making a bigger point about the bill, the bill from a administration that prides itself on being pro-natalist and being pro kids and wanting to see more kids in America. Walk me through that form of redistribution. So there are a number of ways in which babies and kids are basically getting shafted. One is, again, where we started out talking about who pays back the debt. At some point, this debt is going to be repaid, will have to be repaid by future generations of Americans, either in the form of higher taxes or fewer benefits. So that’s going to be today’s kids. That’s a very basic point, but we are also doing a bunch of things to disinvest in their health care, disinvest in their nutritional development by taking away some of these, again, critical safety net benefits that do have a payoff over the long run. And then there are other random things in the bill that just seem to be bizarrely like, I don’t exacting cruelty upon kids for no apparent reason. Like, again, this is really in the weeds, but already on Medicaid. Medicaid dollars, federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used to pay for undocumented people. Some states will use their own funds to provide health insurance to children, regardless of immigration status. And the bill says if you do that, if you use your own funds to pay for these kids, then we are going to strip away all of this other money. So it’s like they’re basically incentivizing states to take health insurance away from children. The child tax credit is another good example of this. Again, it’s like buried in the bill. Probably very few people have realized it’s in there, even though they say they are making it more generous, they’re making it more generous, but basically for higher income people, and they are taking it away from a lot of children. And the way that they’re doing that is that they’re saying if either of a child’s parents doesn’t have a Social Security number, the child is not eligible for the Child Tax Credit. And this does not only affect kids who might have an undocumented parent, it also affects kids who might have one parent who’s here legally, too. If you’re on a student visa, you generally can’t get a Social Security number. So if you imagine a US citizen has a kid with somebody who is in their grad school class, their child will not be eligible for the Child Tax Credit, whereas in the past they would have been. And there’s also a marriage penalty built into all of this too. Like if the parents in that example don’t get married, then the US citizen parent can claim the kid and get the credit. But if they get married, they lose it altogether. So there’s a bunch of little things in the bill that just basically take a lot of resources away from kids in some ways, big and small, especially children of immigrants, but not only children of immigrants, cost shifting more of food stamps onto the states that will disproportionately hurt kids because kids make up a huge chunk of the food stamp receiving population. So there are a bunch of things like that. And I think that kind of gets lost in all of this. I think that’s important, though, because if you look at also where the bill spends new money, one of the places that it spends new money is inflicting pain and accelerating deportation. Oh, Yes Among immigrants. So there’s $45 billion through 2029 for ICE detention facilities. It’s a 365 percent increase annually from where it is now. $14 billion through 2029 for ice transportation and removal operations. A 500 percent increase. So you’re seeing them as they cut Medicaid, as they cut the Affordable Care Act, as they cut green energy subsidies, they’re spending a bunch of money on funding the machines and architecture for deportation, for detainment, for putting off. You begin thinking about other things. You’ve heard from Stephen Miller about suspending due process. And for things that could get very scary. It has been a complaint of the administration that they don’t have the resources to do mass deportation and confinement right now. This bill is meant to give them that money. Yes And look, because Yes, this is a very scary expansion of the detention industrial complex. The other one piece of all of this that I do want to make sure I emphasize is that, Trump says he’s going after gang bangers and criminals and drug dealers and whatever, and those are the people who are getting locked up. Those are with this image conjured up of like, these are people living in the shadows committing crimes. He’s actually been trying to deport a lot of people who have permission to be here and/or had, I should say, permission to be here. He is basically documenting people to create a larger illegal population or unauthorized population by taking away legal status or various kinds of temporary legal status that people have. He has stripped Afghans, Venezuelans, a lot of other populations of the protections that they had against deportation, their ability to work legally, be here legally, work legally. So he is basically manifesting this scary fantasy that he had been portraying for many years that we are being overrun with people who are not allowed to be here. And he’s now saying, no, you’ve now broken the law. But he basically forced them to break the law by taking away their protections. I think this gets to this bigger picture. We’ve been tracking a bit during this conversation. Budgets are a way we make certain goals possible to achieve, and other goals are impossible to achieve their statements of our values. So tax cuts for people in general, rich people in particular, definitely check protecting Medicaid and health for working class people, which you have heard them talk about. Nope Medicaid is getting gutted. This whole world working class coalition now not so much keeping prices down. Between the tariffs and how much more people will pay as we shift health insurance costs onto them and off of the government. We’re not keeping prices down. Cutting budget deficits, which people around Trump have talked a lot about how unsustainable. Our fiscal picture is. This bill is a disaster. But the Stephen Miller mass deportation agenda, the immigration side of this administration and its promises, that is really getting served here. I mean, the thing that the promises we’re keeping here are tax cuts tilted towards rich people and building a huge engine, funding a huge machinery of documentation, as you, I think correctly put it, deportation to detention. Those are our values. I guess those the budget, those are our values. I wish they were more clearly communicated to the public. But again, the fact that this bill has come together so quickly. It’s over 1,000 pages long, should tell you how much they actually want the public to learn about what is in this agenda. I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience. O.K, so I was thinking about the right 3 to recommend. And I’m going to give you three very different titles. Currently, I am reading Ken Rogoff’s book “Our Dollar Your Problem,” which has a sweeping history of how the dollar became the global reserve currency and how much of that was about luck and whether that will persist. I haven’t finished it yet, but I really I’m really enjoying it right now. My second recommendation would be. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver, which came out a couple of years ago and I think won the Pulitzer. And it’s a beautiful novel that’s loosely based or an update of David Copperfield that I think, besides being extraordinarily written, has some tremendous political insights in it as well. I don’t have read it. I have. And she’s been on the show and it’s a great episode. If people want to go back and look it up. Yeah you about resentment among she doesn’t describe them as Trump voters in her book, but some of them could be recognizable as the Trump and the diner archetype Trump voter. And the diner archetype. And then my third recommendation is going to be “Shy,” which is the musical composer Mary Rodgers’s memoir, published posthumously with Jesse Green, who is the theater critic here at the times. And people who know me well know that I’m a big theater nerd, and I loved this book. It’s very dishy. There’s a lot in it about mid-20th century gossip from Broadway and how she dated Stephen Sondheim, who recently passed away. But was not known for being attracted to women and how all of that went. And it’s just a delightful, delightful, gossipy memoir. So definitely recommend that. Catherine Rampell, Thank you very much. Thank you.
