Ezra Klein
speaker
51 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard Jul 2025
Ezra Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now President Trump has yoked his presidency, yoked all of us, to his big, beautiful, that gorgeous, big, beautiful bill.
Let me suggest another name for it.
I'll even stay on trend.
The big budget bomb.
I'm recording this on Wednesday, May 21st.
It's always possible things will change.
But as of right now, the damage this thing will do to the budget, if it detonates, is hard to properly convey, in part because the size of this thing is hard to properly convey.
And the budget, to be honest, is only where the problems this bill would cause begin.
When you're thinking about the size and cost of legislation, you got two different sides to keep in mind.
How much the bill costs, either through new spending or tax cuts, and how much of that cost is paid for versus added to the debt.
The Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about $500 billion over 10 years.
And it paid for that spending and more through tax increases.
The Affordable Care Act was expected to cost about a trillion dollars over 10 years.
All of that, again, paid for.
Trump's 2017 tax reform bill, when you added everything up, left an estimated $1.5 trillion of tax cuts unpaid for.
The big budget bomb exists in a class unto itself.
According to the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, which I think nowadays is Washington's saddest advocacy group, if you take seriously the permanence the Republicans are actually seeking, the big budget bomb will add about $5 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
Five trillion.
That is an insane number.
You remember when Trump promised to balance the budget?
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