Speaker 1: What's going on?
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And again, thank you so much for your support. So yes,
after what do they call that thing the vote rama
where they just they kept changing the one big beautiful
bill the oh bah, and they just kept changing it
and voting on stuff and you know, doing bribes to
various senators to get them to sign off on it.
And by the way, that you know that happens all
the time with this stuff in very you know, close
bodies like you've got in the Senate. They could only
afford to lose the three votes from the Republicans that
they did lose, right, if they had lost a fourth,
then it would have failed. And so they had to
they had to do the Alaska purchase right with Murkowski.
They had to cut her a deal. And if any
of this sounds familiar. This is how Obamacare got done too.
They ran that thing through with the Louisiana purchase, the
corn Husker kickback, the Florida what was the Florida one. Yeah,
that guy lost his seat, Bill Nelson, I think was
his name.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he had these Democrat senators that had, you know,
anxiety about Obamacare and passing it, and so they gave
them all sorts of carve outs for their states so
they would not be held to the you know, all
of the the structure of the program in the same
way that all of the other states that didn't require
bribes in order to get passed. So whenever you have
a closely divided body, the you know, your swing vote
becomes more powerful. If you are the deciding vote, you
then get to dictate a lot of terms. And that's
what Murkowski did when you had Collins come out against it,
you know, Rand Paul he was against it from the beginning,
the floor speech from Tom Tillis before he said, you know,
I'm out of here and I'm not running again. And
his beef was over the medicaid stuff. That left Murkowski
and they leaned on her to try to get her
to vote yes and she eventually did over in the
House where the big beautiful bill now goes back to
the House because the Senate changed it. So the House
had passed a version, sent it to the Senate. The
Senate was like, no, we don't like it. So they
made all these changes in like twenty six hours of
voting and debating and horse trading, and so now goes
back to the House and they're actually I think debating
it now, uh, making all their floor speeches, you know,
for their viral videos and campaign fundraising emails and over there.
I believe the split is two twenty two hundred and
twenty Republicans to two hundred and twelve Democrats. And if
memory serves correctly, the original version in the House only
passed by like a vote, So there's very little margin
for error and or for uh, for deviation from the president.
And the president is sort of at the apex of
his political capital right now, having you know, won every
single swing state, having you know, moved the electorate to
him in the last election, he has more political capital
to get this stuff done. And you know, when it
comes to a guy like Tom Tillis, you don't have
a very wide lane to drive down because every vote counts,
every vote matters, and if you're going to cross the president,
then you should expect to get the standard treatment from
him on this stuff. If the Senate had a larger
majority and Tillis's vote didn't matter, then and he could
have voted no, but the thing still would have passed anyway,
he would not probably have gotten the kind of barrage
the dog piling that he got from Trump and his
followers on social media. So that's just the nature of
the game, right, So what is actually now in this
bill as it has been changed? So I think the
key thing to keep in mind is this is all
about preserving the tax cuts that were initially passed back
in twenty seventeen that were or set to expire. They
were to sunset because that was the original legislation. This
effort is to make these tax cuts permanent, okay, And
then there's all this other garbage that's in there, all
of there, you know, because they don't do remember, they
don't do ear marks anymore, like specifically earmarks where they
would like lard up a bill with all sorts of pork.
So this is how you now do it. So there's
a bunch of stuff that's in there. And obviously you're
talking about government accounting, and so the government accounting is
always really weird too. Like you've probably heard the uh, oh,
it's going to add to the deficit, right, And I
was not aware of this, but the Congressional Budget Office
when they do their estimates, or at least for this bill,
they started from a position that the tax cuts would
expire because that's the current law, rather than saying this
is a continuation of the tax cuts, so the current
revenue would remain the same. So what they did then
was to say, oh, the tax cuts then expire, so
there would be all of this revenue being collected in
taxes because the tax cuts expired. And so if you
were to pass this big, beautiful bill, then that revenue
now goes away. But the revenue never comes back, right,
if it's an extension, it never comes back. So why
would you Why would you score the bill as if
the tax cuts went away, the revenue came back. Why
would you bother doing that? Because if you start from
that position, then yeah, the CBO says that it's going
to increase the deficit by almost three point three trillion
dollars over a decade. That's a nearly one trillion dollar
increase over the House Pay Bill, which the CBO projected
would add two point four trillion to the debt over
a decade. But Republicans disputed the CBO estimates. They said, well,
here's what the AP reports. They're using a different budget
baseline that assumes the Trump tax cuts expiring in December
have already been extended, essentially making them cost free in
the budget, which to me, that makes sense. That's the
whole point of the bill. That's why they're doing this,
and that's why they're doing it on this artificial deadline
that Donald Trump set to have it done by July
fourth because America, you know, and get the PR branding
out of that. Like I understand that. That's fine, it
doesn't matter to me, but it is an artificial deadline.
Will they meet it?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Are they trying to It seems like it.
Speaker 2: But they want this, They want the debt ceiling issue,
They want the tax cuts preserved. Right, These are the
things that are driving this train. And it seems to
me like if the primary purpose is to extend the
tax cuts, you should score the bill based on those
tax cuts. Staying in place, not scoring the bill as
if hey, we got a bunch more revenue. Oh and
then it went away, because it never comes back if
it's just being extended, if the tax cuts are just
being extended. The CBO then released a separate analysis of
the GOP's preferred approach. They did this over the weekend
and found that the Senate bill would reduce deficits by
about five hundred billion dollars. Well, that's a pretty big swing.
You went from a three point three trillion dollar deficit
projection to a defici reduction of five hundred billion. So
keeping the tax cuts constant, scoring it that way, it
leads to a deficit reduction, which I think is a
good thing, right, isn't that what we want to see happen?
A reduction in the deficit. Democrats and economists decry the
GOP's approach as magic math that obscures the true costs
of the tax breaks if you believe all of the
money belongs to the government rather than the American people,
Because that's at the heart of that argument, which is
that we can't let people keep their own money. We
have to bring that money to us. The government needs
that money. We would be taking. We have to raise
people's taxes. That's what a vote against this was. If
you voted against this bill, it was a vote to
allow the tax cuts to expire and a three point
three trillion dollar tax increase to hit Americans who, by
the way, every American got tax cuts in the twenty
seventeen deal, every one of us. Here's a great idea.
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email to Pete at vpedecalenarshow dot com from Dave regarding
the Senate holdouts on the Big Beautiful Bill. If the
holdouts get their bribes for a YA vote, why don't
all senators act like they're going to hold out to
get stuff for their state.
Speaker 1: That's a good question.
Speaker 2: So I think, first off, you have a lot of
senators that are very much pro Trump, right, so they're
not going to try to impede Trump's work because they
they're just like, he's my guy, I'm going to do it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's not perfect, but whatever, and they'll go out there
and sell this thing because they are loyal to the president. Right,
So you take that group out of the mix. Obviously,
take all the Democrats out of the mix, because they're
going to vote no regardless. Then you have some Republicans
that are in purple states or in states where winning
as a Republican is more difficult. That's like Tom Tillis,
that's Susan Collins up in Maine. Rand Paul is just
always a no on these types of spending bills. And
then you've got some that maybe aren't, you know, loyal
so much to the president. They don't really, they're just
kind of like MAGA adjacent, you know. They they're not
really comfortable with it. They're kind of biding their time
on stuff. But maybe they're institutionalists and so if the
leadership says you need to vote this way, then they're
going to do it. Right, They're going to follow their leadership.
And that's John Thune now. And so that's why you
have like the whip counts, you know, the Senate majority whip.
Speaker 1: And that's what they do. They whip the votes.
Speaker 2: They make sure everybody's gonna go along and just because
they don't hold out at the very end doesn't mean
that they didn't get something for their state earlier in
the process or something that they wanted. And there's a
whole bunch of stuff in this bill that changed when
it came over from the House. So I suspect some
of these senators got what they wanted through the normal
horse trading and they didn't have to hold out in
order to get it. Does that make sense? And then
there's also fear of Donald Trump. There are some senators
that do not want to get dog piled by Trump
and his online army, Right, they don't want that headache,
so they'll just go along. That's part of it too.
And I don't know who fits into which camp. I'm
just throwing out different ideas as to why everybody doesn't
do the whole doss And that's what the Freedom Caucus
has been doing in the House for years, much to
the chagrin of the quote unquote establishment Republican leadership. Right,
So let's go into some of the details here from
the big beautiful bill tax cuts and deductions. We'll start here.
This is from the Business Standard. At the center of
the bill is a permanent extension of the twenty seventeen
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was set to expire
at the end of this year. The legislation locks in
lower income tax rates the ones that we have right now,
as well as our current standard deduction, and it extends
various business friendly provisions. There is the provision, for example,
no tax on tips. So there's a federal income tax
exemption for income made through tips, which I think I'm
now going to go to a strictly tip salary position.
I'm going to ask my employer to simply pay me
in tips at a regular level every two weeks. This
exemption would be up to twenty five thousand dollars a year,
and the benefit phases out if you earn more than
one hundred and fifty k. So if you are making
one hundred fifty thousand dollars and you work for tips,
it would start phasing out. Your exemption starts phasing out
after the one to fifty. But if you're making one
to fifty doing tips, you're doing very very well. You're
very good at your job. It also permanently expands the
standard deduction. It increases the child tax credit from two
grand to twenty two hundred per child. Now it requires
only one parent to have a Social Security number as
well social Security income deduction, a six thousand dollars income deduction,
four retirees that earn under seventy five thousand dollars a year,
plus a temporary four thousand dollars senior deduction which phases
out over three years. These provisions amount to more than
four and a half trillion dollars in tax reductions over
the next decade according to the House estimates.
Speaker 1: So four and a half trillion dollars in tax deduction.
Speaker 2: But remember like three of that is from the tax
cuts that were already put on the books in twenty
seventeen that are now just going to continue. There are
Medicaid reforms starting December twenty twenty six, so not this
year but next year. End of next year. Able bodied
childless adults must work or volunteer at least eighty hours
a month to qualify for Medicaid, right, so unless you're disabled,
if you are If you're disabled, that's a separate thing.
But if you are able bodied, then you need to
work or volunteer for eighty hours a month, which is
twenty hours a week. That's a part time gig. That's
less than a part time gig, right, Well, I mean
that's not less than it's still a part time gig.
Speaker 1: But like a lot of.
Speaker 2: Part timers, what what's the cap on part time? It's
like thirty five is it? Thirty five hours a week?
That is not a difficult bar to cross. Also, parents
with children fifteen and older would also be required to
meet the eighty hour monthly threshold, and recipients must verify
their income and residency every two years. There is a
provider tax cap. This is what angered Tom Tillis because
of the way the North Carolina Medicaid system got set
up when they expanded it a year ago by giving
a big fat provider tax rebate basically to our hospital industry.
I'm going to go into the details on this as
well later on, and I covered it a couple of
days ago, but I feel like this is important. There's
another piece written about the specifics of what North Carolina
did and why Tillis was trying to get a carve out.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: If they had given North Carolina a carve out, would
Tillis have then voted for the bill? He may have,
I don't know. Maybe he was trying to pull a Murkowski, right,
he was trying to get a deal like she got. Oh,
they also are creating a fifty billion dollar stabilization fund
for rural hospitals. Okay, So if you hear Democrats talking
about the closure of rural hospitals, they are either ignorant
of or they want you to not know that there's
a fund created for rural hospitals to stabilize them against
whatever impact this might have. The Congressional Budget Office projects
over eleven million people may lose Medicaid access if the
bill is enacted. Well, if they work, they would retain it, right,
I mean that's the idea. There are also these types
of reforms as part of the food stamp program. All right,
if you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too, and you've probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources.
Speaker 3: Why.
Speaker 2: Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is
why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an
app and it's a website, and it combines news from
around the world in one place, so you can compare
coverage and verify information. You can check it out at
check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I put the
link in the podcast description too. I started using ground
News a few months ago and more recently chose to
work with them as an affiliate because it lets me
see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The
blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by
the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground,
dot news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll
get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage
plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription
then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports
ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent.
Speaker 1: Here's a Pete tweet.
Speaker 2: It's from Eric, who says it's amazing how tax breaks
are the only quote unquote cost Democrats are ever able
to identify. It's true, and I don't know, I don't
know why that is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it didn't play. It was there you go.
Speaker 2: I gave yeah, here we go, there's your No, there
it is. I finally heard it. It was a little
bit of a rimshot for you, Eric. I apologize you.
I mean, it wasn't that funny of a tweet. So
we're going to give you like twenty percent.
Speaker 1: Of the rim shot.
Speaker 2: Okay, but it's yeah, it's amazing how tax breaks are.
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. It was just technical glitches here.
Speaker 2: Amazing how tax breaks are the only cost Democrats are
ever able to identify, right, the lack of the money
coming in. They view it as a cost to them
to government. This is a loss to government. The fact
that you get to keep your money is a loss
to them. This is a cost, right, No, this is
this is I'm trying to remember who it was that
I first heard use this term, but it is completely accurate.
Speaker 1: I heard it at the state level where.
Speaker 2: A Republican was criticizing the Democrats in the legislature for
their profligate spending and their structural deficits that they ran
for years and years. And the philosophy is see a penny,
spend a penny any like if you I mean, think
about it. You're doing budget projections when you are drafting
your budget because it's for the next year, so you're
basing these things on projections, and when you end up
taking in more money than you projected, you would actually
receive the Democrat philosophy is automatically is to spend it. Oh,
we took in more money than we thought we were
going to take in. Yay, we can spend it now.
And that's how we ended up with structural deficits because
you kept spending and the revenue then would drop off,
it would be lower than expected, and now you had
no money. And that's why Republicans when they took over,
they beefed up their rainy day fund. And several times
in the last what fifteen years since Republicans have taken
control of the General Assembly in Raleigh, they've given the
money back to the taxpayers.
Speaker 1: They've sent it.
Speaker 2: Back there like we took him too much then we projected,
so here's a refund. We didn't mean to take all
of that. One of the changes in the Big Beautiful
Bill is for food stamps, the supplemental Nutrition Assistance program,
and I heard Ben Shapiro mentioned this on his podcast
I think last night. He said, it's supplemental. It's not
supposed to pay for all your food. It's supplemental. It's
supposed to help supplement And that's why if you're going
to do the work requirements for able bodied people, for Medicaid,
it makes sense to do it for SNAP or food stamps.
And the Senate bill has a range of well, they
have a range of reimbursements that are going to be
based on the error rates. Okay, so you have states
that are administering the programs and from the with money
from the Feds, and they make mistakes, they have people
on the roles that shouldn't be on the rolls and
that sort of thing, and so, and they monitor this stuff,
they audit this stuff, and they find out, oh my gosh,
you have a lot of people on your roles because
you've just approved everybody. And that's a high error rate.
So states that have error rates above six percent would
have to pay anywhere from five to fifteen percent of
the program costs. So if you as a state are
administering this program and you're just giving it out to
people who otherwise are not eligible for it, but you
just don't care because you just want to soak up
all the federal money, and they find out that you've
got an error rate above six percent, well now you're
going to have to start paying for it, because you're
supposed to be monitoring this. You're supposed to be you know,
screening people out and making sure there's not waste, fraud,
and abuse. They also raise the age limit for work
eligible able bodied adults without dependence. It's going from fifty
four years old up to sixty four years old. So
if you can work and you don't have any dependance,
and you're getting supplemental nutritional assistance food stamps, you should work.
State flexibility. Here's the Murkowski bribe. I mean a deal.
States like Alaska and Hawaii could receive waivers if they
demonstrate good faith efforts to comply. Because I guess Murkowski
was worried that her state can't actually get an error
rate below six. I guess that's the Yeah, I guess
that's the problem there.
Speaker 1: Let's head over to the phones.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 1: This is Dave. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hello, Dave, Hey, p how's it going, Hey good?
Speaker 1: What's up?
Speaker 3: All right? So we hear we hear that Tom tillis,
you know, and like Grand Paul and you know, and
even Elon. You know, obviously the elected people don't not
supporting this. Elon is critical about the bill, and you know,
I hear he says, poor is so much pork in there?
And then you hear you know, five trillion is going
to be added to the deficits. So what exactly is that?
And it's not a gotcha question, I just legitimately so
the nobody soyfically talk about the specifics of that.
Speaker 2: Right, So, I think the five trillion dollar number that
you're talking about is the debt ceiling.
Speaker 1: Yes, which is that?
Speaker 2: And so that's the that's the that's the debt that
we've not passed.
Speaker 3: They're not passing a budget. They're just putting the ball
again and they're just putting that in there.
Speaker 1: Is Yeah, this is not a budget, right, you are correct.
Speaker 2: This is not a budget. This is essentially like a
continuing resolution. It's just a continuation.
Speaker 3: What are they spending stuff on that we should be
irritated about?
Speaker 2: Right, Well, I mean there are people that are irritated
with the medicaid reforms and the food stamp reforms that
I've gone over. Yeah, they're mad about that because that
will generate or allow the it's not going to generate revenue,
it'll allow the federal government to not spend as much
money on these programs. That's the big chunk of how
they're paying for it. Now. For the debt ceiling. I
think the House version was like four trillion. The Senate
version is five trillion. And they're doing that in order
to not have to come back and have a government
shut down deadline looming for them before the next election.
That's what they're That's what they're trying to do, is
to kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling.
Speaker 1: That's the five.
Speaker 3: Trillion they need budget. They need a budget.
Speaker 2: I agree, I agree, I'm not I'm not happy about
all of this. I understand why they're doing it, but
I'm not happy where like Ran.
Speaker 3: Paul and Tom Tillis's specific you know, problems with it
that they didn't vote for it.
Speaker 1: So so I did.
Speaker 2: I covered this in depth on Monday when Tillis and
said he was not no sorry, when he was run
he was not going to run for reelection, and I
played his floor speech where he was railing against this
Medicaid reform structure. Rand Paul is against it because it's
not paid for. Rand Paul wants a balanced budget.
Speaker 3: You can plug your podcast now.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, the peapod dot com. But so you can
go back and listen to the Monday episode. But I'm
actually gonna I'm gonna.
Speaker 2: Circle back like Pasaki would, and I'm gonna circle back
on Tillis's argument on the medicaid issue because it's to me,
it's it's pretty offensive the argument that he was making
on this, because it's basically a scam. And I'm gonna
I will get back to that. But that's the five trillion, Dave.
I appreciate the call man. The five trillion figure is
the debt ceiling. You know. Stories are powerful. They help
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who's a national treasure even though he's from Britain, but
he's an American citizen now, he made this point yesterday
on a podcast I think it was the Megan Kelly podcast.
Speaker 1: He said that something to.
Speaker 2: Always keep in mind with GOVCO accounting and the rhetoric
around it is that a cut is not a reduction
in the rate of growth.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's not a cut.
Speaker 2: So if the Congressional Budget Office comes out and they're like,
you know, we are seeing or we're projecting that growth
is going to be like the growth in a government
program is going to be three percent each year over
the next ten years, three percent each year over ten years,
and then the Senate is like, yeah, you know what,
we're going to limit that to two percent growth, And
then that gets framed as a cut because it's not
growing at the rate that the CBO predicted or projected
or wanted or whatever. Like, they're not the same things.
You and I don't do our budgets like this. We
don't see these things as cuts. If you're like, hey,
you know what, I spend a one hundred dollars a
week eating out and I'm gonna I'm gonna just keep
that level for the whole next year two rather than
increase it, I'm gonna keep it level. You would not say, well,
I wanted to take it to one hundred and fifty
dollars a week eating out in my budget, but I'm
going to keep it at one hundred. You wouldn't say
that I'm cutting fifty dollars out of my budget, because
you're not. You're maintaining a one hundred dollars a week
dining out budget.
Speaker 1: What else is in.
Speaker 2: The the large attractive legislation or the big beautiful bill?
Wall construction? Yeah, remember that, remember that promise? Build a
wall just got ten feet taller. There is an allocation
of forty six point five billion dollars for wall construction
and maintenance along the southern border. This will also include
cameras and other kinds of you know, tech to help
with the border security. They're going to increase detention capacity,
so they are expanding detention facilities, which is actually a
big part of the issue that ICE and Border Patrol
are running into where they don't have a lot of
space to house the people that they're collecting right while
they wait deportation. So they've got forty five billion dollars
earmarked for increased detention capacity, along with another thirty billion
dollars to hire, train, and purchase equipment for more US
Immigration and Customs enforcement personnel. Also, there's a one hundred
dollars fee for asylum seekers. Now, the House proposal set
the fee at one thousand dollars, but that now got
or a knocked back to one hundred dollars fee. This
is an offensive part of the bill to me, which
is the State and Local tax deduction. State and local
tax deduction, which is salt salt state in local taxes.
Under the current law, it is capped at ten thousand dollars.
So if you live in a high tax state aka
Democrat controlled states, and they tax you a whole bunch
of money, you get to deduct ten thousand dollars of it,
which means what, which means subsidies for high tax states.
Speaker 1: The Senate bill increases.
Speaker 2: Is the cap to forty thousand dollars, but it's only
for four years or five years. After that the cap
would go back to ten thousand dollars. And this is
to satisfy a bunch of Republicans from high tax states,
the Salt Caucus they call themselves. That was their bribes
that they needed. The bill raises the debt ceiling by
five trillion dollars, that exceeds the four trillion dollar hike
in the House version. This provision is intended to avoid
a potential standoff over government borrowing later this year, with
Treasury officials warning that the US could run out of
funds by August. Fiscal conservatives have criticized this provision, calling
it a betrayal of Republican pledges to reign in spending,
which yeah it is, Yeah, it absolutely is. And then
I mentioned Lisa Murkowski. The bill seeks to impose spending
cuts on foods, damps, and medicaid. Murkowski, from Alaska, was
worried that the strict cuts would disproportionately affect her state, Alaska,
which relies heavily on federal funding for those programs. Senators
eventually agreed to exempt Alaska from potential changes to food
stamps and to increase federal funding for rural hospitals over
the next five years by twenty five billion dollars, and
Senators also removed a solar and wind tax from the bill,
hoping to appease Murkowski. She walked away unhappy with the bill,
but she still voted yes. All right, that'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I
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at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.