By Bryan Chai | Commentary, The Western Journal
They often say light is the best disinfectant, and whomever “they” are, they’re right.
In a related note, it’s pretty clear that most Americans — this writer included — are in the complete dark about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that keeps making the headlines.
If you were to consume your news exclusively from the establishment (my sincerest condolences if that’s the case), you would think the bill was some sort of hypothetical bogeyman, a looming Sword of Damocles over the U.S. economy.
It’s all a “big risk,” if you want to take the liberal Washington Post at its word.
Thankfully, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — a longtime advisor to President Donald Trump — is shedding some light on it all, and it’s a true disinfectant for the media’s histrionics.
In a lengthy Sunday afternoon X post, Miller took to the social media platform to address some bill misconceptions that “require correction.”
“The first is that it doesn’t ‘codify the DOGE cuts,’” Miller posted. “A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to ‘mandatory’ spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps.
“The senate rules prevent it from cutting ‘discretionary’ spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory.”
Well, that should ease some minds that are constantly fretting over the Department of Government Efficiency’s goal of trimming government fat and waste.
(It won’t, but it should.)
“I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit,” Miller said, continuing to his second point. “This lie is based on a [Congressional Budgeting Office] accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent.
“CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.”
Adding to the deficit is a key reason fiscally conservative Republicans have opposed this bill, but as Miller puts it, those concerns appear to be based on faulty assumptions of an irrelevant CBO forecast.
Whoops.
Lastly, Miller took aim at the outright lies surrounding the bill.
“Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars,” he wrote. “This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill — it doesn’t ‘fund’ almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not).
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE WESTERN JOURNAL
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