Trump’s Big Budget Bomb

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime. When you think about this bill, you should think about risk. It would increase our risk of a fiscal crisis by adding a hefty sum to our nation’s debt, at a time when we’re alienating the countries that typically buy our debt. It would slash food stamps and strip health insurance from millions of people, increasing the risk that the safety net won’t be able to catch any of us, at a time when President Trump’s tariffs have increased the risk of a recession. It’s what I’m calling the Big Budget Bomb. And if it passes, we’ll all be in the blast radius. My guest today is Catherine Rampell. She’s an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and an anchor on MSNBC. She’s been covering this closely, so I asked her to come on the show to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings. Editor’s note: This episode was recorded before the House passed Trump’s domestic policy package. Mentioned: “Arkansas’s Medicaid experiment has proved disastrous” by Catherine Rampell “The Time Tax” by Annie Lowrey “Barbara Kingsolver Thinks Urban Liberals Have It All Wrong on Appalachia” by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: Our Dollar, Your Problem by Ken Rogoff Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Shy by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Tyson Brody.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  We live for reasons I will not pretend to understand. In an age when the only truly bipartisan idea is that landmark legislation demands triple B literation. President Joe Biden's signature proposal was Build Back Better. Now President Trump has yoked his presidency, yoked all of us, to his big, beautiful bill.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Big, beautiful, that gorgeous, big, beautiful bill.

• 0:56Ezra Klein?

  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. But we have to begin somewhere. When you're thinking about the size and cost of legislation, you've 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.

• 1:40Ezra Klein?

  The Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about $500 billion over 10 years, and it paid for all that spending and more through tax increases. The Affordable Care Act was expected to cost about $1 trillion over 10 years. All of it, 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. But the big budget bomb exists in a class by itself. Even a naive analysis, one that buys into some very obvious Republican budget tricks, finds that this bill, as it exists right now, cuts taxes and raises spending by more than

• 2:22Ezra Klein?

  $4 trillion over 10 years, and only pays for about $1.5 trillion of that. So, once you add in interest on all that new debt, and we're paying real high interest rates on that nowadays, the budget bomb puts more than $3 trillion, $3 trillion, on the national credit card over the next decade. But let's not fall for dumb budget tricks. The bill is full of tax cuts the Republicans have slapped expiration dates on. The way it's written right now, it wipes out taxes on overtime and tips and car loans, but only for four years. That'll expire in 2028, the way Republicans have now written the bill. But we know they have no intention of allowing those tax cuts to expire.

• 3:04Ezra Klein?

  They want to run in 2028 on the fear that Democrats will let them expire. Republicans use this trick a lot. If you look back at those 2017 tax cuts from Donald Trump's first term, they use the same gimmick. And in this very bill, in this very bill, Republicans are canceling all those expiration dates. I'd use the old fool me once line, but I wasn't fooled on this last time, not going to pretend to be fooled on it this time. I do think it's at least a little bit funny. The Republicans want budgetary credit for using that expiring tax cut trick in the very same bill in which they're also deleting their last set of expiration dates. One thing you'll never hear me say about Donald Trump's Republican Party is that it

• 3:47Ezra Klein?

  lacks chutzpah. 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. $5 trillion, that is an insane number. You remember when Trump promised to balance the budget?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I want to do what has not been done in 24 years. Balance the federal budget. We're going to balance it.

• 4:22Ezra Klein?

  I also remember that. That happened in March. So here I've been talking about what the bill does to the budget. But there's this other question, too, maybe the more important one. What is it trying to accomplish? $5 trillion is a lot of debt. But if we were adding it and it would lead us to invent and commercialize nuclear fusion, or perfect a drug that would double our healthy lifespans, then fine, it's worth it. But here's what this bill does in the real world. It cuts taxes, mostly for richer people. It cuts Medicaid and food stamps. Republicans are also allowing some Obamacare subsidies to expire. And so the estimate is that between all this, 13 million people, 13 million, will lose health insurance. It's also grimly exact.

• 5:05Ezra Klein?

  The bill has $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people who make more than $500,000 a year. And it has $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. It is a straight transfer from people who cannot afford food and medical care to people who can afford to fly first class. The bill also guts the tax credits that support the wind, solar, electric vehicle, and nuclear power industries. China will be thrilled by that. So when you think about this bill, you should think about risk. This is a bill that increases our risk of a fiscal crisis. What if all these other countries were alienating? All these investors were scaring?

• 5:48Ezra Klein?

  Stop buying our debt, even as we're creating trillions more in debt we're going to need them to buy. This bill increases the risk any of us face if we can't afford healthcare or food for our families. If Trump's tariffs cause a recession, this bill gutted the safety net millions of us would have relied on for help. It pumps tens of billions of dollars into ICE detention facilities and deportation capacity. And so it raises the risk faced by immigrants or anyone else caught up in the administration's mass deportation and detention operations. Look, I've been a policy journalist for more than 20 years. I've covered more bills than I can count. I cannot remember a crueler or more irresponsible piece of domestic legislation that has been seriously proposed.

• 6:33Ezra Klein?

  And its sins are compounded by its size. If the Republicans' big budget bomb goes off, we are all in the blast radius. My guest today is Catherine Rampell. She's an economics columnist at The Washington Post and anchor at MSNBC, and she's been covering this closely. And I've asked her to come on the show today to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings and what it'll really mean for people's lives. As always, my email is [email protected].

• 7:12Ezra Klein?

  Catherine Rampell, welcome to the show.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Great to join you.

• 7:15Ezra Klein?

  So this big, beautiful bill, big, beautiful budget, it is really quite big. There's a lot in it. If you could only tell people about three or four of its parts, what would they be?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I think I would say it is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past.

• 7:40Ezra Klein?

  Walk me through that.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  So it has a lot of big bundles of parts in it, which normally we would have more time to digest piecemeal. But those include big tax cuts, which are generally quite regressive. They help higher income people more. It also includes big cuts to the safety net, particularly Medicaid and SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps. And it includes basically eliminating a bunch of climate-related tax credits, which are investments in the future, as well as cutting programs that disproportionately help children, which I would also say robs, robs our future and will still cost a lot of money,

• 8:23Speaker 02

  which leaves the bill due to future generations of taxpayers.

• 8:28Ezra Klein?

  And how big is that bill?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Depends on how you calculate it. There are a bunch of competing estimates out there. But over 10 years, you know, it's somewhere around $4 trillion. And before the negotiations are done, it may well be more than that because there are a bunch of Republicans who want even more tax cuts.

• 8:48Ezra Klein?

  You and I are both battle-scarred veterans of the 2010 bunch of fights.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

• 8:55Ezra Klein?

  And I think those fights, when we were constantly being told by Republicans that we were about to become Greece and needed immediate austerity.

• 9:06Ezra Klein?

  And then, in fact, interest rates were completely fine for years and years. Soured a lot of people on warnings about the debt. But we're in a pretty different interest rate environment now, so interest rates are a lot higher.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:18Ezra Klein?

  And the payments have gotten pretty serious. So, interest payments are currently the second highest expenditure in the federal budget. It's more than our entire national defense spend. Adding a bunch more debt on top of that seems a little dangerous. How do you think about the debt burden we're facing down here?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  What's that expression, something that can't go on forever won't?

• 9:44Ezra Klein?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  I think that's kind of where we are, in that we cannot continue to sustain this level of deficit spending without, at some point, you would think, bond investors revolting and needing to, as our political leaders, needing to either cut spending or raise taxes or both. But when that actually happens, I have no idea. You know, it might be, depending on where Trump is headed, Trump is doing other things to call into question the safety or risk-freeness of the US dollar and US debt, so setting that aside.

• 10:28Ezra Klein?

  Well, this is what worries me. So, I'm used to doing budget coverage.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:32Ezra Klein?

  And you tend to kind of sit in the confines of the budget. You're worried about this provision, that provision, but there's this interaction effect between what Trump is doing elsewhere, the tariffs, the trade war with China. We've seen bond markets shake recently.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:51Ezra Klein?

  Under various fears. And then piling on a huge amount of new debt in this budget, if it passes.

• 11:00Ezra Klein?

  And we have this world where we have much higher interest rates. I think the Trump administration would like to see interest rates come down.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Oh, they've, Trump has made that more than clear.

• 11:07Ezra Klein?

  More than clear. But passing a budget like this makes it a lot harder for the Fed to bring down interest rates.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yes, well, a lot of things that the Trump administration is doing will make it harder to reduce interest rates. One of which is adding a lot more debt piled on to the existing debt that we already have. Some of it has to do with the fact that tariffs are likely to increase prices. All of these things are kind of coming together to make it more likely that rates either go up, or at least don't come down as much as certainly anyone looking for a house would like them to be.

• 11:47Ezra Klein?

  I know this all gets wonky to try to plug the weird and quite, I think, dangerous budget into the other parts of the Trump administration's economic theory, but I want to try to do it for a minute. Because we've just spent months covering the tariffs and the theory behind the tariffs. And on some level, the theory behind the tariffs is this, that trade deficits are bad. And this world where what's happening is that the rest of the world keeps giving us money. And we keep taking in all of their investment. And that has effects on the dollar and effects on our manufacturing. And the Trump administration wants that on some level to stop. They believe America's been ripped off by selling so many financial products in order

• 12:32Ezra Klein?

  to buy goods.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that doesn't make any sense, though.

• 12:36Ezra Klein?

  Well. Yeah, I agree, that's one of the problems with this administration.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  It doesn't make any sense. And I think Scott Bessant is smart enough to know that it has been to our advantage that other countries or private individuals around the world want our treasuries because it has enabled us to continue borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and not have to make the politically difficult decisions to either raise taxes or cut benefits. So I don't, it sounds like you think that the administration wants people to stop buying our debt. Is that what, is that your theory of the case?

• 13:11Ezra Klein?

  I think that they believe that this world.

• 13:16Ezra Klein?

  In which our financial products are so unbelievably attractive. And we are buying so much from those world and giving them our money. And they take our debt in that is a bad world. And they want to shift the balance of trade and inflows and outflows. And that's what the tariffs are largely about. And that they're doing this at this moment when they're going to pile on a bunch of debt.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  I think what's happening here is that Trump decided he likes tariffs. And everybody around him scrambles to reverse engineer a justification for it.

• 13:50Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that I don't disagree with.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  I don't think that anybody is thinking, yes, we need to have more tariffs in order to have more manufacturing, in order to have the rest of the world not buying our debt. Because everything Trump wants to do will increase the debt.

• 14:04Ezra Klein?

  So I am not arguing there's not a contradiction. What I'm saying is you're doing both of these things. And they are putting on a bunch of tariffs.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:11Ezra Klein?

  And they are making us a less trustworthy place to invest. And then, on the other hand, they're going to radically increase our debt and the need to have the world keep buying it. And these two things together, making America a both less welcoming place for that kind of endless purchasing of our debt, and making America a less trustworthy place to purchase debt, and making America a place it needs to sell ever more debt, seems like a recipe for things to go very badly wrong.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:43Ezra Klein?

  At some unknown point in the future.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yes, I 100% agree with that.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  That is where I'm going with all this.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  I 100% agree with all of that. But I don't think that any of this is deliberate. You know, I think Trump is convinced that the bill won't cost anything. You know, people like Scott Bassett have told him it's going to supercharge growth and we'll grow our way out of debt. And then we don't have to worry about whether there's appetite out there to buy more treasuries.

• 15:14Ezra Klein?

  Do you buy that the taxes we're seeing in this bill will lead to a lot of growth we would not have otherwise had?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  I think that it will stimulate demand somewhat in the near term. If people's taxes go down, they have more money to spend on other things. We saw that last time. So, you know, there'll be some supply side effects, some demand side effects, but not enough to overcome all of the other reasons why this is slowing the economy. So like I was talking with This guy who is the CEO of a Christmas tree company,

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Balsam Hill, they sell artificial Christmas trees from China. And I was asking, like, so Trump says he's gonna help you in the long run by cutting your taxes. And he said, we ran the numbers. And if they cut their taxes on their profits by half, that would offset a 2% increase in tariffs. So it's just like the numbers don't add up, particularly for industries that are really exposed to the tariffs. But in general, like for the macroeconomy, no, these things are not going to fully pay for themselves, even if there is a tiny grain of truth to the idea that they could stimulate the economy, at least in the near term.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  So I just, I think, again, I think in some ways, it sounds like you're giving them too much credit. Like, I don't think it's as strategic as you make it out to be, but the bad outcome you described, I think, yes.

• 16:40Ezra Klein?

  I don't hugely care what they think they're doing.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Okay, fair enough.

• 16:44Ezra Klein?

  I care what they're doing. I agree that all of their different arguments for things are contradictory

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:51Ezra Klein?

  and don't cross domains, that there's no macro theory of the case.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:55Ezra Klein?

  But they are doing all these things. And that seems like a huge risk that is building up beneath the system to me.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yes, I agree with that. And again, this Moody's announcement, I think, is...

• 17:10Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, do you want to describe what happened there?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are basically three main ratings agencies. And for a very, very long time, the US debt was rated by all of these ratings agencies as pristine, risk-free, you know, the gold stars all around, triple A's, is what they called it. And then, over the last 10 to 15 years, ratings agencies started knocking us down a peg and saying, maybe they're not as good for their word as they seem to be, including because there was a debt ceiling debacle where it looked like we might default on our debt, et cetera. More recently, the last holdout Moody's,

• 17:56Speaker 02

  which I think had not downgraded us in over 100 years, or we've had a perfect rating for them for over 100 years. Moody's basically said, uh, yeah, we don't think these guys are quite as 100% good for their money as we once thought because US deficits have already been on track to be growing and growing and growing. And now with the likely passage of this additional big, beautiful bill, that problem is only going to get worse. So it doesn't really mean anything per se. Like it's more symbolic. It is more like yet another scolding from

• 18:40Speaker 02

  the financial markets in a way that lawmakers are acting irresponsibly.

• 18:47Ezra Klein?

  So when you add a bunch of debt, it matters what you're adding the debt for. In this case, we're adding it to extend the tax cuts passed in 2017 and then add a bunch of new tax cuts on top of it.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:00Ezra Klein?

  How do you describe the, the total tax cut package here? What is it trying to do? What should we, who is it benefiting? What's your gloss on it?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So overall, most Americans will get a tax cut. I think a lot of the talking points are relative to, again, relative to what they would have had if no bill had passed because a lot of the tax code is expiring and people's taxes would have otherwise gone up. So when you hear talking points like, these are only tax cuts for billionaires or corporations, whatever, that's not quite true. Like, I think, I looked this up before we met, but, um, basically 94% of Americans will get some tax cut relative to what would have happened if Congress does nothing. But the very biggest benefits definitely go to

• 19:50Speaker 02

  higher income classes, like two thirds, this is from the Tax Policy Center, two thirds of the plan's tax cuts by dollar value go to those in the top quintile. People in the top 1% would get about a quarter of the tax cuts. So that's people making over a million dollars, basically. They get about a quarter of the benefits. And then if you look at the overall bill.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It's not only that the rich benefit more, it's that the poor come out behind because to the extent that any of this is paid for at all, it's largely paid for by taking other benefits away from low-income people.

• 20:29Ezra Klein?

  Like what benefits?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Medicaid and food stamps are the biggies here. Medicaid currently enrolls something like 1 in 5 Americans. It's a huge program, it's a popular program. And Republicans have argued that their changes are only about kicking off, you know, the freeloaders and apocryphal welfare queens and will make sure that everyone who is deserving of this public health insurance program continues to receive it. But if you actually look at the provisions themselves, that seems very unlikely.

• 21:09Ezra Klein?

  I want to stay on the Medicaid side of this for a minute. One of the big ways they're trying to save money in Medicaid without saying what they're doing is cutting it is what's called work requirements. And the theory of work requirements is we make you prove that you, if you're an able-bodied person, that you have worked more than 80 hours or you are looking for work in some kind of intense way. And if you can't prove that, you lose your Medicaid. Because, you know, if you're going to get the benefit of Medicaid, you should show the responsibility of either working or looking for work. The problem is, and my partner Annie Lowry has like talked about this as the time tax

• 21:52Ezra Klein?

  and written about this kind of administrative complexity a lot, we make it so hard to do and to prove that huge numbers of people lose coverage through being unable to complete the paperwork. And so you're weaponizing time and bureaucratic complexity to deny people a benefit they are supposed to have.

• 22:15Ezra Klein?

  So how much of the Medicaid cut is built around that?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  So a lot of it. And I actually did a lot of on the ground reporting about a pilot version of this back in 2018, 2019 in Arkansas, where the Trump administration allowed Arkansas to impose work requirements. And I'll say a few things. So the first thing is, like, this is a very popular, actually, provision. Something like 62% of Americans like the idea of Medicaid work requirements, including about half of Democrats. So it's because it sounds reasonable. Why shouldn't people have to show that they are productive members of society in order to receive these government benefits? But it's not really clear, like, what problem it's trying to solve, in that almost 2/3 of people who are on Medicaid

• 23:02Speaker 02

  are working. They're working either part-time or full-time. And the remainder who are not working have something that is generally considered like an allowable excuse, meaning that they're a full-time caregiver, they're enrolled in school, they have a disability, etc. It's only a very tiny slice of people who don't have one of these exclusions, one of these exemptions that's spelled out. So in Arkansas, most of the people, something like 18,000 people, lost their Medicaid within the span of a few months. Most of those people were kicked off of Medicaid not because they were shown to have not been working or have one of these other allowable exemptions, but for administrative reasons. Basically, they

• 23:46Speaker 02

  didn't fill out the paperwork, or they didn't fill it out sufficiently. There was one guy that I profiled, Adrian McGonigal, who actually was working at a chicken plant. And he got confused about how to report his hours. It was like not mobile-friendly. The website literally shut down after, I think, 9 o'clock every day. I don't know, the hamsters had to go to bed or something. And he didn't have access to a computer. He only had his phone. And he thought he did it once, and that was sufficient. Anyway, he lost his health coverage. He had severe COPD. Because he was not able to get his medications and to treat this chronic illness, he ended up getting very sick, lost his job at the chicken plant.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  And so this policy that was sold as encouraging people to get jobs actually cost him his. He unfortunately passed away quite recently, as I learned. I got in touch with his former legal aid attorney, who had said that, you know, ultimately, Adrian had been one of the plaintiffs in the case to challenge this law and did get it overturned. And he was able to get his Medicaid back. But he kind of went into this downward financial and health spiral as a result of all of this. So that these things have consequences. And there are long-term harms that are created by what seems like, you know, reasonable paperwork to some people.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  But the reality is that this is a backdoor way of basically purging people from their health insurance. Again, to take it back to the Congressional Budget Office, that is their assumption as well. The Congressional Budget Office says, yes, this will save a lot of money and a lot of people will lose health insurance. There will be no change on employment. That is what their assumption is. This policy that, again, is supposed to be about making sure only the deserving people get jobs and encouraging more people to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps will actually have no effect on how many people have jobs.

• 26:00Ezra Klein?

  That's pretty grim.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:03Ezra Klein?

  And it saves a lot of their money, actually, which implies that a lot of people are losing coverage through these paperwork requirements.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:13Ezra Klein?

  And I just think this is ugly. If you want to argue that people shouldn't have health care, fine. If you want to argue people should have jobs, we could have all kinds of labor market policies that help people get jobs.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  None of which are in this bill.

• 26:28Ezra Klein?

  None of which are in this bill. But for the administration that did DOGE to add a huge layer of bureaucratic complexity.

• 26:41Ezra Klein?

  How good will the other languages of this paperwork be? How quick will their response times in these agencies be?

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Will the website shut down after 9 p.m.?

• 26:50Ezra Klein?

  Will the website shut down after 9 p.m.? It just, it really reveals something, both a unwillingness, I mean, Trump has promised not to go Medicaid, an unwillingness to stand up for what they're actually doing, and then an effort to weaponize the very bureaucratic inefficiency that they otherwise pretend to condemn and root out against the weakest and most powerless segment of society, people who do not make enough money.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:20Ezra Klein?

  To get health insurance.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there are a bunch of-

• 27:22Ezra Klein?

  The whole thing just, it actually turns my stomach.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a bunch of other red tape that they add. They require that people on Medicaid have to reprove eligibility more frequently, which again, if the process were completely seamless, who cares? But it's not. Every time people have to reprove eligibility, even if nothing has changed in their situation, there's a chance the paperwork gets lost, people have to find the time to go to the office, you know, to deliver the forms in person, or they have to navigate this clunky website, or whatever. It's just a matter of like hacking through all of this red tape, American Ninja style. You know, that's sort of how I picture it. It's an obstacle course essentially that they've set up for people to make it harder

• 28:06Speaker 02

  for them to prove that they are entitled to the benefits that they are legally entitled to.

• 28:11Ezra Klein?

  And then there are about $300 billion in cuts to SNAP, which is the sort of modern term for the food stamps program. And there's also the, a lot of this bill is about extending tax cuts from the past.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:25Ezra Klein?

  But right now, there are these subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. They're passed under the Biden administration, which have made the premiums in the Affordable Care Act much cheaper. They've led to a pretty big increase in the number of people enrolled. And one of the pay fors in the bill is to allow those to expire. Do you mind talking a bit about how that'll work?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Uh, yes. So understandably, there's been a lot of focus on Medicaid. There are other provisions, either in the bill or part of sort of the broader Republican agenda, that will also end up with people losing their health insurance.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  There are these expanded subsidies essentially for people to buy insurance on the individual marketplace that have partly been responsible for the fact that the uninsured rate in America, I think, was at its lowest level on record last year. It's partly because of Medicaid expansion, it's partly because of this. And it's like, technical and wonky and people don't really pay attention to it. But those expanded subsidies were passed by Democrats and are set to expire at the end of this year. Republicans could choose to extend those, just as they are extending a lot of other things on the tax side of-

• 29:40Ezra Klein?

  And pretending that extension costs no money.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Correct. But they have chosen not to. So when you see these scarier figures for how many people are going to newly become uninsured from the CBO, you know, over 13 million people, that is inclusive of Medicaid, changes to the Affordable Care Act, and some other regulatory stuff that basically Congress is codifying.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  So I just want to put a very fine point on this. According to our best read of what the bill is going to do, we're going to drive 13 million people off health insurance.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:17Ezra Klein?

  We're going to end $300 billion of spending that gives food to hungry people. And that is going to go to pay for, depending on how you calculate it, roughly a quarter of tax cuts goes to the top 1%. Like, that's the fundamental math of this bill.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yes. That is the fundamental math of this bill, and this is part of the reason why I, among others, have characterized it as a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Because- It is forcing low-income people who would otherwise have access to these safety net benefits that have been around and been popular for many decades.

• 31:01Ezra Klein?

  Including among Republicans, as Senator Josh Hawley's been saying.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, just as an aside, there are Republicans in the House who very narrowly won their elections last year by fewer votes than the number of people who have met, who are on Medicaid in their districts. So, yeah, besides like the human cost of all of this, politically, it seems pretty dumb to me because while there is maybe a stereotype of who is the typical food stamp recipient or the typical Medicaid recipient, stereotype that's, you know, racialized among other things, people from all walks of life go through periods where they need this assistance.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Many of them are Republicans, many of them live in districts that are currently represented by Republicans, and at some point, people are going to notice when they can't put food on the table, or they can't get the inhaler for their kid.

• 32:29Ezra Klein?

  It used to be the case in American politics that Democrats won voters who made less than $50,000 by a lot, and Republicans won voters who made more than $100,000 by a lot. And so we used to have these fights over the safety net, but they somewhat aligned with the political coalitions. Republicans wanted to cut benefits like this, but mostly, those were not their voters. In 2024, Donald Trump won voters making less than $50,000. Wasn't a huge victory among them, but he won them. Donald Trump won voters who did not go to college. When you look at who is on Medicaid, when you look at who is on food stamps, when you look at who needs expanded health insurance subsidies

• 33:14Ezra Klein?

  under the Affordable Care Act, it is concentrated in this group of voters.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Who thought Trump was going to make their cost of living cheaper?

• 33:23Ezra Klein?

  And who are also now paying

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yes, and

• 33:25Ezra Klein?

  Higher tariffs.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Right. There are many ways in which this administration and allies in Congress have run a pretty regressive agenda, not looking out for the common man, shall we say. I mean, we haven't even talked about some of the other Doge cuts recently, like closing half of the regional Head Start offices. Head Start is the program that serves low-income families by providing pre-K and childcare and other ancillary services for their parents. My question will be, at what point do Americans necessarily connect the dots? I think with tariffs, people understand the tariffs are happening. Some of these other connections,

• 34:08Speaker 02

  I think, are a little bit more opaque. And some of that is of necessity and some of it, I think, is by design. Like, one of my, one of my most deeply held political beliefs is that complexity rewards demagogues. And this bill is definitely a case in point. Like, budgets are always complicated and make people's eyes glaze over. But normally, journalists have some time to digest what's in it and help people understand how it might affect them. Instead, all of this stuff is being dumped at once. So it's very easy to lie about, like, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are just looking out for you and are going to make you rich and are going to kick off

• 34:53Speaker 02

  all of those freeloaders and welfare queens from programs so that you get them and they don't. And it's an easier story to tell the more opaque the actual policies are.

• 35:06Ezra Klein?

  It's why I've thought a fight happening as we speak, and we don't know how to resolve yet, is interesting. So the bill, as initially written, has the work requirements come into play in 2029, after the next presidential election. So they get to pocket these assumed savings because we do budget numbers over 10 years. But in theory, nobody will feel the thing they are doing to Medicaid until 2029, or at least that thing they are doing to Medicaid. But the more right wing members of their caucus want that brought up to 2026. In which case, people will begin to feel it immediately within this term, such that

• 35:47Ezra Klein?

  it could be something that people are upset about come the next presidential election. Again, we don't know how it'll play out, but I thought it was quite telling that the Republican majority's preference, not their sort of more Freedom Caucus minority, was, "Let's put this in the bill, but make it the next president's problem." Because you can lie about things until you're thrown off of Medicaid and a bunch of people you know are thrown off of Medicaid. And then what just happened comes clear real quickly.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, there's this fundamental tension within the Republican caucus, as you pointed out, between members who think that the provisions are not heartless enough and those who think that they are too heartless, in the political sense, I guess, in that the people on the Budget Committee, I should say, when we're recording this, we don't know what concessions were given to them as yet in order to get the bill out of committee. But the people who voted against it initially said that they wanted these Medicaid work requirements to be moved up, they wanted more of the climate-related tax credits to be rescinded, et cetera.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  But then there are a lot of other members of the party who are very worried about exactly the political risk you identified, that people will realize they've been kicked off of these benefits and will take their anger, justified anger, out on the Republican Party and whoever's on the Republican ticket. And this is a problem not only in the House, but it's a problem in the Senate. I think you mentioned Josh Hawley has talked about this.

• 37:31Ezra Klein?

  Hawley seems to be against Medicaid cuts at high levels altogether, and he's making the argument.

• 37:38Ezra Klein?

  That I sort of just alluded to, we are now a working class party.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 37:41Ezra Klein?

  It is our voters on Medicaid.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:44Ezra Klein?

  Cutting Medicaid for our voters.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Well, and there's also some disagreement in the party about whether to even call these Medicaid cuts, right?

• 37:51Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think there's not disagreement. They don't want to call them Medicaid cuts.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yes, fair, fair.

• 37:55Ezra Klein?

  But they're, they're not, they might play stupid, but they're not idiots.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yes, fair.

• 38:01Ezra Klein?

  They know they're saving money and that when you save money on Medicaid, what just happened is somebody somewhere did not get healthcare.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Right, but they are spinning it as it's only the undeserving people.

• 38:11Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Who won't get healthcare, the people who are lazy, who are freeloaders, who are government parasites and, you know, can't get their butt to work.

• 38:20Ezra Klein?

  But what Josh Hawley is saying.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  But not you, not you.

• 38:22Ezra Klein?

  But what Josh Hawley is saying is, look, guys, we can't be believing our own spin.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yes, we can't get high on our own supply.

• 38:31Ezra Klein?

  We can't get higher on our own supply. If we do this, we are cutting Medicaid for our voters. And what I'm saying is, the people writing this bill know what they're doing.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:39Ezra Klein?

  They are not confused about what is happening when you cut Medicaid in this way. They know that the only way this saves money, or the main way this saves money, is people who otherwise could have walked into a hospital or a doctor's office and put down a Medicaid card and gotten healthcare coverage that the government would have paid for, cannot do that.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:00Ezra Klein?

  That's the mechanism.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Yes, I agree with that. I mean, there are a lot of contradictory things.

• 39:05Ezra Klein?

  Yes, I just don't want to allow their spin to stand on this show. That's why.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  That's a totally reasonable point. Yes. So there are members of the Republican Conference who want these Medicaid cuts to kick in faster. There are members who want them to kick in more slowly, or maybe not at all, because they understand that it is their voters who may suffer. There are members of the party who don't want to raise deficits. There are members of the party who think that deficits don't matter. There are just like, part of the issue here and part of the reason why I have been really wondering, like, where does this bill actually go, is that there are so many mutually exclusive constraints. In a party that has a very thin margin,

• 39:53Speaker 02

  that it's hard to know who gets to extract what demands in exchange for their vote. Because like, we haven't, we haven't really talked about the Republicans who are in, you know, the Salt Caucus, who want basically bigger tax cuts for rich people by allowing people in blue states, predominantly blue states, to deduct more of their state and local taxes.

• 40:15Ezra Klein?

  I was gonna-

• 40:16Speaker 02

  And, and, and they may be the defining, you know, it seems like the, the people who are worried about Medicaid cuts hurting their own constituents, they've gotten a little quieter recently. The Salt Caucus is now louder, so maybe they're the ones who get to twist the bill in their direction, but then it's going to cost even more. And what do you do about that?

• 40:34Ezra Klein?

  And be more regressive.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  And be more aggressive. And you end up having the bill cost more? Do you end up kicking even more people off of benefits? I don't know. Like, these puzzle pieces just don't fit together.

• 40:44Ezra Klein?

  I was gonna say that the, the thing here is that the only thing holding the coalition together is fear of Donald Trump himself.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:53Ezra Klein?

  That House Republicans, Senate Republicans, whatever they think on, on most policies, very few of them will dare oppose him. Except there's this one thing that happened.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I know what you're gonna say.

• 41:04Ezra Klein?

  Which is that Donald Trump had exactly one good political instinct here. And he said, "Maybe one of the ways we should pay for this is we should raise taxes on really wealthy people. And not by a ton."

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:19Ezra Klein?

  But maybe just enough to say we're doing it.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:23Ezra Klein?

  What happened to that?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Um, this was one of the few times I think I've seen his, uh, friends and allies in Congress, like, visibly recoil. And many of them said publicly, "Yeah, that's, that's not a good idea." And so Trump then posted on social media, "Well, I think they should do it, but it's probably a bad idea, so I kinda understand if they don't." This is one of the few times I feel like I've seen Donald Trump back down in one of these fights. And, um, you know, it's clear that this was in the no-fly zone.

• 42:01Ezra Klein?

  It, it was just interesting to see this vestigial reflex-

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:07Ezra Klein?

  -of the Republican Party, as I understood it to exist in 2013. Kick in.

• 42:14Ezra Klein?

  And the one thing Donald Trump cannot do as he tries to build his working class multiracial coalition is the most popular policy move in his arsenal for a bill like this, which is to pay for some of your tax cuts by raising taxes on rich people.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Well, you said the one thing that holds the Republican Party together is fealty to Trump. I think it's fealty to Trump and tax cuts, particularly regressive tax cuts. This has been their North Star for many, many years, and it does not surprise me that that's their one red line with this guy is that we cannot raise taxes on higher income people and corporations.

• 42:59Ezra Klein?

  So Donald Trump wins the election, running against the high prices of the Biden era. And he walks into an economy where inflation has calmed down, things are pretty steady and stable, stock market's in good shape. And then he begins raising prices through tariffs. And the tariffs are bouncing around a lot. Right now, we're on a reduced level with China for 90 days as we negotiate something or other.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Only 30%.

• 43:27Ezra Klein?

  A mere 30%.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:29Ezra Klein?

  But there are tariffs now on all kinds of goods coming from all over the world. Those price increases are starting to show up, are going to continue showing up. There's also a huge amount of uncertainty pausing all kinds of business investment, because when you don't know what the tariff rate or tax structure will be from day to day, you're not going to make a bunch of long-term capital investments.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:51Ezra Klein?

  So every forecaster says that the risk of recession has been rising from what they anticipated it would be at the beginning of the year. Now you get a bill like this, where we're doing things like cutting SNAP, cutting Medicaid, cutting the Affordable Care Act. How do those two things interact?

• 44:09Speaker 02

  I think it's never really a great time to kick a lot of people off of critical benefits like Medicaid and SNAP, but probably the worst time is when we are about to head into a recession. Because A, that's when people are most likely to need these programs, and they automatically kick in. And so there's a little bit of the safety, that's what the safety net is, right? It's to catch people when they might otherwise be falling to help them get back on their feet. These programs also, because they kick in automatically, they're thought of as automatically stabilizing the overall economy.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Because if all of these people who were losing their jobs at once stopped spending at once, that's going to lead to kind of a downward spiral. They stop spending, the places that they would spend their money, stop hiring, lay off people, et cetera, et cetera. But it's effectively like an automatic form of stimulus and helps the economy recover a little faster. If instead, you have these things coinciding at once, where we have a recession, on the one hand, and these massive changes to programs like food stamps and Medicaid, then you will have not only greater suffering among individuals in the near term, but potentially a deeper and longer recession.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  And look, I really, I don't think a recession is a fait accompli. You know, I don't want to suggest that it's definitely going to happen, but the odds have increased. And all of these agenda items are conspiring to make life a lot more difficult, whether intentionally or otherwise, a lot more difficult for the most vulnerable Americans. Because again, the tariffs will also increase the prices of the things that they buy. So yeah, it's like, it's the perfect storm.

• 46:03Ezra Klein?

  So Republicans will tell you that this whole conversation is unfair, that we're ignoring all the ways in this bill, that they are expanding help for the working class. So there is a somewhat complicated approach to expanding the child tax credit. There are things like no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. Talk to me about this set of policies, the more populist dimensions of this bill.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  So I don't think they're uniformly bad, all of the things that you just mentioned. I do think that we should be doing something to make more assistance available to families with kids, for example. But the way that they have structured these changes is still not really targeting those who need it. So just as an example, the no tax on tips thing, it sounds like that would help your typical waitress or other hospitality worker.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  In reality, those people are probably low income enough that they are not going to benefit from this because their income is below the threshold where they would get taxed much anyway, whether that income is coming from tips or from wages. The people who are going to benefit are going to be the people who are disproportionately high income, who can maybe reclassify more of their income as tips or as overtime. So this is going to be like a big boondoggle for accountants and tax attorneys.

• 47:38Ezra Klein?

  And we've got to the IRS.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  And we've got to the IRS.

• 47:41Ezra Klein?

  Checking on tax shenanigans are going down.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Right. So this is not structured in such a way that it will actually help the people that I think are being envisioned when you think about tipped workers or you think about people who need overtime pay. They are probably gonna see very little benefit, or at least relative to where the dollars are actually going to be flowing. It's primarily going to help higher income people. The same thing with like cutting or eliminating taxes on social security. Most people under current law, like who are low income already are not paying taxes on social security. The people who are left out of the current system, who would be exempt, are disproportionately

• 48:26Speaker 02

  higher income because of how the law currently works. So a lot of these things that sort of sound populist on their face are either symbolic or actually going to be regressive. And it will also distort a lot of behavior, too. Like I should tell the Washington Post to just pay me 100% in tips and then, you know, all of my income will be tax-free.

• 49:12Ezra Klein?

  One of the other ways they're trying to pay for part of this is gutting various tax credits to incentivize clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act. This is another part of the bill under active negotiation. The right wing of the Republican Party wants to make the evisceration of these tax cuts quite complete. The bill, as it is currently written, just makes it profound, is the way I put it. But solar credits, wind credits, tax cuts for electric vehicles, nuclear, which in general, one tends to think about the Republican Party supporting. Putting aside even what you think about climate change.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:55Ezra Klein?

  These were fast-growing, are fast-growing, American industries. And they are industries we don't want to lose to China, right? We have big tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles for a reason. Donald Trump has wanted to bring down American energy prices and wants American energy dominance. These are things that generate energy and contribute to an overall capacity. How do you think about what this will mean just for the energy prices and the industries behind them?

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Well, and a lot of the investments have, to date, been concentrated in red districts as well. I mean, my general view on so-called clean energy, green energy, whatever term you want to use, is that the transition is coming no matter what, just because the economics in the long run make much more sense to electrify everything and to use solar and wind and other renewables as much as possible, because like on the margin, sunshine and wind are free and fossil fuels are not. So it's going to win in the long run. The question is only how quickly? And politicians can do things to either speed it up or slow it down.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  And if they slow it down, that means we are just delaying the time until we get the really, really cheap, not to mention cleaner and more renewable energy, and raising costs effectively in the near term.

• 51:24Ezra Klein?

  But it does something else, too, which is that there is a... Race to have the dominant corporate players in what will be globally important export industries.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  That's also true.

• 51:36Ezra Klein?

  As you say, there's a transition going on. It's probably going to happen one way or the other. And China, who we are obsessed with competing with and for reasonable reasons, they've pumped a huge amount of money into trying to dominate solar technology, trying to dominate wind technology, battery technology, EVs. So putting aside, again, what you think of renewable energy, and my opinions on it are exactly what one would think they are. This is a gigantic gift to China, where their electric vehicle industry is already quite globally competitive. We are keeping those cars out for a reason. We worry if they come in, they would beat the cars we are making. But now, nobody likes Tesla in Europe.

• 52:20Ezra Klein?

  And we, liberals don't like Tesla in America increasingly. And we are like cutting the knees out of our other electric vehicle companies, which are using these kinds of credits to catch up. And to be really good at solar, wind and nuclear, you gotta fund it. And we're gonna stop doing that, too. Just from their industrial policy strategy, this just seems disastrous for us.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yes, I generally agree with that. I mean, I think I am more skeptical of industrial policy more generally than you are. And I thought that the tariffs we placed on not just Chinese solar, but global solar back in whatever it was, 2018, and then extended under Biden. I thought those were dumb. Like, if other countries want to sell us solar on the cheap, let them. Let us have cheap, clean energy.

• 53:13Ezra Klein?

  We don't disagree on this.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Okay. And I agree with you that this set of policies is, again, somewhat at odds with Trump's general pro-manufacturing renaissance agenda. Like, why are we talking about bringing back sneaker factories? And maybe doll factories at this point? I'm not really sure. Like, very low-value items? If we are going to use industrial policy to try to revive or invest in some

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Segment of the manufacturing industry, we should be doing it for these goods of the future.

• 53:52Ezra Klein?

  So this gets to another form of redistribution that you brought up at the beginning and I wanted to end on, which is the redistribution from the young to the old. And it's a way that the climate side does this very directly. If we are slowing down that transition, slowing down emissions curves, people who are younger and are going to live in a more volatile climate are going to experience more harm from that. But you're making a bigger point about the bill. The bill from an administration that prides itself on being pro-natalist and being pro-kids and wanting to see more kids in America. Walk me through that form of redistribution.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  So there are a number of ways in which babies and kids are basically getting shafted. One is, again, sort of where we started out, talking about who pays back the debt. At some point, this debt is going to be repaid, will have to be repaid by future generations of Americans, either in the form of higher taxes or fewer benefits. So that's going to be today's kids. That's like a very basic point. But we are also doing a bunch of things to disinvest in their healthcare, disinvest in their nutritional development by taking away

• 55:13Speaker 02

  some of these, again, critical safety net benefits that do have a payoff over the long run. And then there are other like random things in the bill that just seem to be bizarrely like, I don't know, exacting cruelty upon kids for no parent reason. Like, again, this is really in the weeds, but Medicaid dollars, federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used to pay for undocumented people. Some states will use their own funds to provide health insurance to children regardless of immigration status.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  And the bill says, if you do that, if you use your own funds to pay for these kids. Then we are going to strip away all of this other money. So it's like they're basically incentivizing states to take health insurance away from children. The child tax credit is another good example of this. Again, it's like buried in the bill, probably very few people have realized it's in there. Even though they say they are making it more generous, they're making it more generous, but basically for higher income people, and they are taking it away from a lot of children. And the way that they're doing that is that they're saying if either of a child's parents doesn't have a social security number, the child is not eligible for the child tax credit.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  And this does not only affect kids who might have an undocumented parent. It also affects kids who might have one parent who's here legally too. Like if you're on a student visa, you generally can't get a social security number. So if you imagine like a US citizen has a kid with, you know, somebody who is in their grad school class, their child will not be eligible for the child tax credit, whereas in the past they would have been. And there's also a marriage penalty built into all of this too. Like if the parents in that example don't get married, then the US citizen parent can claim the kid and get the credit. But if they get married, they lose it altogether.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  So there's like a bunch of like little things in the bill that just basically take a lot of resources away from kids in some ways, big and small, especially, you know, children of immigrants, but not only children of immigrants, cost shifting more of food stamps onto the states that will disproportionately hurt kids because kids make up a huge chunk of the food stamp receiving population. So there are a bunch of things like that, and I think that that kind of gets lost in all of this.

• 57:54Ezra Klein?

  I think that's important though, because if you look at also where the bill spends new money, one of the places that it spends new money is inflicting

• 58:05Ezra Klein?

  Pain and accelerating deportation.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 58:10Ezra Klein?

  Among immigrants. So there's $45 billion through 2029 for ICE detention facilities. It's a 365% increase annually from where it is now. $14 billion through 2029 for ICE transportation and removal operations, a 500% increase. So you're seeing them as they cut Medicaid, as they cut the Affordable Care Act, as they cut green energy subsidies. They're spending a bunch of money on funding the machines and architecture for deportation, for detainment, for, you know, particularly if you begin thinking

• 58:51Ezra Klein?

  about other things you've heard from Stephen Miller about suspending due process and for things that could get very scary. It has been a complaint of the administration that they don't have the resources to do mass deportation and confinement right now. This bill is meant to give them that money.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and look, because yes, this is a very scary expansion of the detention industrial complex. The one piece of all of this that I do want to make sure I emphasize is that Trump says he's going after gang bangers and criminals and drug dealers and whatever. And those are the people who are getting locked up with this image conjured up of like, these are people living in the shadows, committing crimes. He's actually been trying to deport a lot of people who have permission to be here, or had, I should say, permission to be here. He is basically de-documenting people to create a larger

• 59:52Speaker 02

  illegal population or unauthorized population by taking away legal status or, you know, various kinds of temporary legal status that people have. He has stripped Afghans, Venezuelans, a lot of other populations of the protections that they had against deportation, their ability to be here legally, work legally. So he is basically manifesting.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  This, you know, scary fantasy that he had been portraying for many years that we are being overrun with people who are not allowed to be here. And he's now saying, no, you've now broken the law. But he basically forced them to break the law by taking away their protections.

• 1:00:33Ezra Klein?

  I think this gets to this bigger picture we've been tracking a bit during this conversation. Budgets are a way we make certain goals possible to achieve and other goals impossible to achieve.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  They're statements of our values.

• 1:00:49Ezra Klein?

  So tax cuts for people in general, rich people in particular, definitely. Check. Protecting Medicaid and healthcare for working class people, which you have heard them talk about? Nope, Medicaid is getting gutted. This sort of whole world working class coalition now, not so much. Keeping prices down between the tariffs and how much more people will pay as we shift health insurance costs onto them and off of the government. We're not keeping prices down. Cutting budget deficits, which people around Trump have talked a lot about how unsustainable our fiscal picture is, this bill is a disaster. But the Stephen Miller mass deportation agenda, the immigration side of this administration

• 1:01:34Ezra Klein?

  and its promises, that is really getting served here. I mean, the promises we're keeping here are tax cuts tilted towards rich people and building a huge engine, funding a huge machinery of dedocumentation, as you, I think, correctly put it, deportation and detention. Those are our values, I guess. That's the budget.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Those are our values. I wish they were more clearly communicated to the public. But again, the fact that this bill has come together so quickly, it's over 1,000 pages long. Should tell you how much they actually want the public to learn about what is in this agenda.

• 1:02:17Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so I was thinking about the right three to recommend, and I'm going to give you three very different titles. Currently, I am reading Ken Rogoff's book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, which has like a sweeping history of how the dollar became the global reserve currency and how much of that was about luck and whether that will persist. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm really enjoying it right now. My second recommendation would be Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which came out a couple of years ago, and I think won the Pulitzer.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  And it's a beautiful novel that's loosely based, or sort of an update of David Copperfield, that I think, besides being extraordinarily written, has some tremendous political insights in it as well. I don't know if you've read it?

• 1:03:17Ezra Klein?

  I have, and she's been on the show, and it's a great episode. If people want to go back and look it up.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, about resentment among, she doesn't describe them as Trump voters in her book, but some of them could be recognizable as like the Trump in the diner archetype, Trump voter in the diner archetype. And then my third recommendation is going to be Shy, which is the musical composer of Mary Rodgers's memoir, published posthumously with Jesse Green, who is the theater critic here at The Times. And people who know me well know that I'm a big theater nerd, and I love this book. It's like very dishy.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  There's a lot in it about mid-20th century gossip from Broadway, and how she dated Stephen Sondheim, who recently passed away, but was not known for being attracted to women, and how all of that went. And it's just a delightful, delightful, gossipy memoir. So definitely recommend that.

• 1:04:25Ezra Klein?

  Catherine Rampell, thank you very much.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:04:44Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klans Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahada. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gald. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin, and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Anurag Sastar, and special thanks to Tyson Brody.