“Forcing states to cover some of the cost of food stamps would be a big change for how the program operates, and one that is long overdue. “The federal government pays for 100 percent of the benefits, so state administrators have little incentive to crack down on theft,” Chris Edwards, chair of fiscal policy for the Cato Institute, and a longtime advocate of food stamp reform, tells Reason. While most states are not swindling federal taxpayers as often as Alaska does, more than $1 in every $10 spent through the food stamp program last year was paid out in error.
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to get Murkowski and Sullivan on board with the bill, the Senate added a sweetener: Any state with a food stamp error rate of more than 13.3 percent will be exempt from the federal-state cost-sharing measure for two years.
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Imagine that you’re administering the food stamp program in a state like Delaware, which last year had an error rate of 12.37 percent. If the Senate version of the tax bill becomes law, you’d have a pretty strong incentive to simply let that error rate rise a bit for the rest of this year, thus buying you two more years of a fully federally funded SNAP program with no mandatory state spending.”
“Republicans once talked seriously about aligning taxes and spending. They cared about economic distortion, simplicity, and broadening the tax base. Now, too many just want the sugar rush of tax cuts without fiscal discipline. Meanwhile, Democrats want to vastly expand the state and pretend that billionaires alone can foot the bill. Both sides are wrong. The math doesn’t work, and the morality of the reckless spending is worse.
Those who want to frame this bill as pro-growth are dreaming. They’re relying on unrealistic economic assumptions about a short-run bump to justify the consequences of long-term debt increases—and banking on cost-disguising budget gimmicks that nobody takes seriously.”
Repeated Republican presidents and Congresses have told us that tax cuts will pay for themselves, and they repeatedly have not paid for themselves. Tax cuts like these are budget busters.
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is horrible policy and greatly adds to the debt and deficit.
Trump’s superpower is his ability to threaten members of congress with primary challenges. Republican members of congress know the bill is a bunch of shit shoved together, but they voted for it anyways because they are weak cowards.
Congress is broken and has been broken for some time. Regular order where Congress members debate and understand bills is dead.
States like Alaska got a sweet deal by avoiding some of the bad policy coming from the bill. This was done to convince senators to vote for it.
Huge debt, bad policy, and sweetheart deals…where’s the tea party!?
“These reversals may be surprising, but they were not remarkable. It was par for the course for congressional Republicans who, in recent years, have shown a proclivity for taking bold, theatrical stands before meekly capitulating in the face of political pressure — particularly from President Donald Trump.”
“For decades, Republicans have extolled the virtues of removing loopholes and carveouts from the tax code, arguing it would make the system fairer and more efficient, while allowing for lower overall tax rates.”
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“Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is not an exercise in tax simplification.
Instead, it began with a push to extend the party’s 2017 tax cuts — which despite some streamlining also introduced some complexity — and piled more on top, in line with a slew of presidential campaign promises. Add in a heavy dose of congressional politics, and the result was a sprawling and quirky piece of legislation that is distinctively Trumpy: lower taxes and a bigger pile of tax breaks.”
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“several economists I spoke with worried it is the worst of all combinations: increasing the debt to pay for tax breaks that lead to neither growth nor other economically useful outcomes.”
Republicans/Trump frontloaded the start of popular items in the big bill, and delayed unpopular items until after midterms, making it harder for voters to know what the people they are voting for actually did.
“Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” includes a gift to millions of families: $1,000 in an investment account for every eligible newborn.
The new savings vehicles, akin to Individual Retirement Accounts, are designated for children who are U.S. citizens born from 2025 through 2028. In addition to the one-time government contribution, parents and others can chip in as much as $5,000 a year to the accounts, which beneficiaries can access at 18, with some constraints.
The seed money is a boon for recipients and will grow tax-deferred. Financial planners say parents and guardians might do better putting their money into existing investment vehicles such as a 529 plan, a savings plan designed to cover college expenses. But 529s are limited to education, while backers say the new accounts can help their recipients beyond college.
Republican lawmakers call the accounts “Trump accounts,” though the Senate’s plan to officially name them after the president did not make it to the final version of the legislation, which was signed Friday. They deliver on an idea that both Democrats and Republicans have floated for years: to invest money for all children at birth.
Withdrawals from a 529 are not subject to state or federal taxes as long as the funds go toward qualified education expenses – a feature the new investment accounts don’t share. And in the new accounts, parents’ deposits don’t qualify for a tax deduction, notes Greg Leiserson, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University. “You have this very slight or minimal-to-nonexistent tax benefit,” he said. “What is the point here?”
Financial adviser Amy Spalding of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said she will continue to steer her clients to 529s. “It’s better from a tax standpoint,” Spalding said. “And there are more investment options. And then there’s a higher contribution limit.” (For 2025, a single person can deposit as much as $19,000 a year into a beneficiary’s 529, while married couples can contribute as much $38,000.)
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withdrawals will be taxed at typical income rates, not at the capital gains rate of a taxable brokerage account. “For most people, this is going to be worse than what they could do in a taxable account,” he said.
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The law requires the new investment accounts to track a U.S. stock index
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“If you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to start school in the fall’ – if the market falls over the summer, the planning you were doing about how you were going to pay for college is totally messed up, because the money you thought would be there, isn’t.”
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account holders cannot touch the funds until they turn 18. After that, the rules are the same as those of an individual retirement account – withdrawals are taxed like income, plus an additional 10 percent tax penalty on any withdrawals before age 59½ except for certain qualified uses.
Those uses include paying for college, supporting themselves if they become disabled, or recovering from domestic abuse or a natural disaster. Beneficiaries also can withdraw as much as $10,000 to buy their first home, and up to $5,000 when they have a new baby themselves.
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Even one of the Trump accounts’ biggest proponents in Congress, Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah), said in an interview that for many parents, the new account design offers more benefits for retirement than for college expenses.”
“The popular child tax credit will receive a slight boost from President Trump’s signature tax and spending bill — but there are caveats.
Currently, taxpayers who make under $200,000 annually as a single filer, or $400,000 if filing jointly, can qualify for a partially refundable credit of up to $2,000 for each child they claim as a dependent who is under age 17 and a US citizen or qualifying noncitizen.
The new legislation increases the credit to a maximum $2,200 per child. Without the bill, the maximum credit would have reverted to $1,000.
But the increase, which amounts to a 10% bump, follows years of rising prices that have chipped away at the value of the original benefit. And many extremely low-income children — in addition to US citizen kids of undocumented parents — will be locked out of the payments altogether.”
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“To qualify for the refundable portion of the child tax credit, which is called the “additional child tax credit” and can be worth up to $1,700, taxpayers must earn at least $2,500 in annual income. (A refundable tax credit can lower tax liability past zero, potentially generating a refund.) Families who make less than that receive no benefit, while many more children are in low-income households that earn just enough to receive part of the benefit but not enough to receive the full payment.”
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“The average benefit for taxpayers with children who made between $10,000 and $20,000 in 2022, for example, was $800, according to the Congressional Research Service. That pay range includes people who worked full-time jobs at the federal minimum wage. Families earning between $200,000 and $500,000, meanwhile, saw an average benefit of $2,810.”