Richard Rubin
speaker
154 appearances
10 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 14 Apr
Richard Rubin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's a test for Trump. Can he get everybody together? But it's also a moment for those members to kind of decide how far they're willing to push up against where the rest of the party and the president are going.
I covered that bill in 2017. And when it passed, they set all these tax cuts, the rates, the standard reduction, the child credit to expire after 2025. And I was like, OK, well, I know what I'm doing in 2025. And here I am in 2025 covering the extension of those things.
They see this as a moment to really go out and lock those in. That's the core of what this bill is.
The new stuff, they really are focusing on not people at the very bottom of the income scale who don't pay income taxes now, but people in the middle. So there is a higher standard deduction on top of the additional standard deduction. There is a child tax credit goes to $2,500 per child maximum.
The extra standard deduction for senior citizens, people 65 and over, goes up by several thousand dollars if this passes.
tax credits for wind, solar, battery manufacturing, all those kinds of things, you know, finish sooner and phase out faster. And so that's also part of the way that they're paying for this.
The Medicaid changes include work requirements for recipients.
Yeah, or that you're seeking work or doing some sort of work-type activity if you're able-bodied. So that's part of it. There's new limits on nutrition assistance, what we call SNAP or food stamps. There's some limits on that, but that's part of the bill.
Republicans are talking about the tax cuts as essential. The idea of extending the tax cuts is basically non-negotiable. It's something that they really feel is imperative economically, something they need to do. The spending changes, the spending cuts are something they also feel is an imperative to turn the tide on budget deficits, to try and rein in spending.
Their argument is that Biden and Democrats overspend and they need to start reining that in.
So there are, I think, a few different groups of holdouts, and we'll take them in turn. One is the conservative hardline holdouts, people like Chip Roy of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Josh Burkine of Oklahoma, and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. They're concerned about spending, largely. They think that the bill doesn't do enough to rein in spending.
They're concerned that the work requirements for Medicaid start too late, right? That it's backloaded and that a future Congress might just come in and change that. And so they want to accelerate that probably to 2027. They're concerned that the clean energy tax breaks don't go away fast enough, right? There's sort of a ramp down.
And, you know, if you set a 2031 date for the final phase out of certain energy tax credits, that lobbies will come and the next Congress will come and Trump will be out of office and there will be opportunities to extend those dates further out.
Clean energy projects, though it was passed by Democrats, have largely happened in Republican districts because that's where there's open land. It tends to be more rural. So wind, solar factories tend to be... more tenable and more feasible in those places as opposed to, you know, in Manhattan.
And so vast phase-out would hurt those projects that are happening and jobs and investment that are happening in those districts. So you've got those sort of moderate, more moderate members of the Republican conference who are very concerned about that. And so you've got a push and pull, as you can see with the hardliners.
The more they raise that cap, the more that people who pay lots of state and local taxes can deduct those taxes from their federal income and pay less to the federal government. Republican plan, as it currently stands, raises that tax deduction limit of $10,000 to $30,000. And they said, no, $30,000 is not enough. That can be, you know, property taxes are really high.
This is a very sort of symbolic issue now in those areas. And they're saying they will kill the bill if they don't get more.
Yes. Oh, no, you're absolutely seeing the divides in the party over spending, over taxes, over energy, over Medicaid, over health care broadly. Yes, it's all on display here in the House of Representatives.
They've got to find a number that satisfies those SALT members, the New York, New Jersey members. They've got to somehow get them on board, or at least enough of them. They've got to figure out how to get the hardliners satisfied without losing votes on the moderate side. So on Medicaid and the clean energy stuff.
That's the hope that they have. I mean, one alternate theory is there is no space, right? That's the fear, I think, is that and Johnson is eternally optimistic and confident that he can make magic happen here.
Showing 121–140 of 154 · page 7 of 8
← Previous
Next →