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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Senate is not going to just take this and rubber stamp it. The Senate's got its own ideas, its own personalities, its own factions, its own divides, its own priorities. And that's really the next phase of what happened. And so as important as this week is, it is just that step. And then the Senate will have its say.
It matters because it's the government pulling back a little bit on the protections it provides for low-income people and the government pulling back on taxes across the board, both, you know, for middle-income households like we've talked about and people at the top who get to continue having the tax cuts they've been having.
The last time that Republicans really made a dent in these sort of entitlement mandatory programs was nearly 30 years ago. And so a lot has happened since then. And that, I think, is a real signal that there's a willingness and an interest to do those kinds of changes. It's a signal of how far Republicans can be willing to go on the spending side.
The changes in Medicaid, in nutrition assistance, in agriculture, whatever those end up being, whatever those spending changes end up being, they're a sign of what the Republican Party itself is capable of doing. This is not Republicans pressuring a Democratic president into accepting things. This is
the purest distillation of what this Republican Party at this moment with these slim majorities can produce.
Part of that report clearly said, look, we're concerned that the proposals that are coming out of this Congress and administration does not make significant, meaningful changes.
The concern is that the more the U.S. government is borrowing, it'll be harder to have investment capital for new factories, new homes, new whatever. And it can drive up interest rates. And those interest rates obviously go into what you're paying on credit cards and mortgages and those kinds of things.
And they would also argue that other parts of the Trump agenda, the deregulation, oil and gas production, are also going to generate growth. And they're saying, basically, if you take all of that growth, the growth caused by this bill and the growth that will happen outside this bill, that will increase the economy so much, then throw off enough revenue and basically cover the cost.
The way they're thinking about it is the extension of the tax cuts won't get felt much at all because it's just keeping the status quo. These things are scheduled to expire where people are very much used to them. So Republicans clearly are concerned about deficits, but they also view an expiration of the tax cuts as scheduled at the end of this year as completely untenable.
They're trying to extend all of the tax cuts that are expiring at the end of this year, the ones they passed in 2017, but temporarily. They're trying to add some new tax breaks in addition to that.
Does that change, you know, does it hit beneficiaries, does it hit providers, does it hit hospitals? I mean, there's a lot of concern about what a shrinking flow of funding might mean for rural hospitals in particular. And so I think that's something that we're still getting analysis on.
It's an incredibly difficult job that House Speaker Mike Johnson has, right? Like he's got all of these different factions who know that for all intents and purposes, this is their one big beautiful shot to write legislation with a Republican majority. So they want to make sure that they get something that they can live with.
This is really just the framework, the blueprint for what the president calls his one big, beautiful bill. And so it sets the basic budget parameters that will then allow them to write real legislation in the next couple of months that extends tax cuts, adds more tax cuts, cuts some spending, adds spending on border security and national defense.
— What exactly that all looks like is very much not known right now. We know the contours and the outlines, and this provides kind of the structure for it. But this is really, as a lot of lawmakers emphasize, just that first step.
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