Consumer spending on 2025 Fourth of July celebrations is expected to reach $8.9 billion, according to the National Retail Federation—a slight decrease from previous years, but still well above pre-pandemic level spending. Next year, taxpayers can expect to pay even more for Independence Day festivities, albeit indirectly. On Friday, President Donald Trump signed the One […]
Here we go again. This week, the Senate unveiled, honed, and passed its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it’s a fiscal monstrosity. What was already an oversized mess in the House has been supersized into a $4 trillion ode to unseriousness. This isn’t tax reform. It’s a bipartisan piñata stuffed with […]
Funding for Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare accounted for 41 percent of federal spending in FY 2024. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to add $3.9 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years, aims to rein in some entitlement spending by implementing work requirements for Medicaid recipients. However, these […]
Imagine that you’re renting an apartment and the terms of the lease require paying your landlord $2,000 every month. Now, imagine that the lease expires at the end of this month. Here you sit, on July 1, with no lease signed for the month of August. Congratulations, you’ve now got $2,000 extra dollars that you […]
Elon Musk promises new political party:Â Like Larry David opening up a spite store, so too will Elon Musk start a spite party if President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill passes. “If this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day,” wrote Musk on X. “Our country needs an alternative to […]
Domestic policy bill gets lambasted: “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” wrote Elon Musk on X, referring to the version drafted by Senate Republicans. This is basically Groundhog Day: The last time Musk critiqued his former BFFs in the Trump administration, […]
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” aims to avert the tax increases that would result from the expiration of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it’s drawn criticism for not doing enough to reduce the debt or deficit. Earlier in June, The Washington Post reported on publicly funded homes in some cities costing […]
For months, Republicans have argued that there’s a glaring flaw in various budgetary projections showing that deficits will significantly increase if Congress passes a major tax cut and spending package. The problem, as they see it, is that initial budget projections of major legislation—like those crafted by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—fail to take into […]
President Donald Trump has described the upcoming military parade using a familiar theme: its size. It will be a “big, beautiful” event, he told NBC’s Meet the Press last month. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The parade will, however, objectively be big, from the contents of the parade itself—25 M1 Abrams main […]
President Donald Trump and many of his allies in Congress are making grand claims about the economic growth they say will result from the recently proposed “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump has accused critics of not understanding the budget proposal, “especially the tremendous GROWTH that is coming.” A closer examination of the economic realities involved […]