Big, Beautiful, B...
On Friday, the 4th of July, the President signed his Big Beautiful Boondoggle Bill. The legislation will add roughly $3 trillion to the U.S. deficit over ten years. That’s a lot. However, what supporters of the bill will point out is that the U.S. debt grows by $1 trillion every 100–120 days. Three trillion over ten years is a step in the wrong direction, but it’s not any more cataclysmic than about 300 days of regular government expenditure.
Elon Musk is enraged. Is he wrong to hate the bill? No. Does America need to deal with a fiscal time bomb? Certainly, it must. Is the answer to start a new political party that is a mirror of the Libertarian Party? That would not only be fruitless but also a duplication of effort.
Politics is a practical profession. It requires imagination, but it also requires compromise and sense of realism. Donald probably didn’t get everything he wanted and likely settled in a few areas. Having reviewed the final bill in one afternoon, it’s not a difficult read if using a computer. The name is utterly atrocious, but that’s how Donald works. It is likely he didn’t read much of it. There’s no way the President knew he was altering part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, Section 359k (and neither did it interest him). On the other hand, there really isn’t as much wasteful spending as in Obama or Biden-era legislation.
Large omnibus bills are rarely the way to govern, but that never stopped Congress. Will there be a second Big Beautiful Bill? What about a Big Beautiful Budget instead of another big beautiful burden to shoulder? Maybe that’s expecting too much from a Congress that loves to go on big beautiful breaks. There’s a conservative majority in both houses, a Republican in the White House, and a right-leaning judiciary. Avoiding America’s looming big beautiful bankruptcy shouldn’t be too much to ask from these big beautiful branches of government.
