How are we going to pay for all this shit?

[CPT Savajo]

Originally Posted by RX792P

Compare your statement with the One Big 'Beautiful' Bill...

What party pushed the OBBB thru?
What are the tax implications for the 'rich and businesses' of the OBBB?

Hint...it's not the Democrats.

Too think there is a difference between Democrats or Republicans is what people don't understand. When the next Democrat President gets in there the spending packages will just be bigger and bigger.

[RX792P]

a bit off thread, but my opinion is we have become a three party nation.
Democrat
Republican (often called RINOs...which really translates to Republicans in Normal Operation)...an endangered species
MAGA

Some of the Republicans actually believe in spending restraint.

[CPT Savajo]

Three political parties? We only have one political party, It's called the Uniparty. Deficit spending has bankrupted this country. Americans will realize it sooner or later while most will never understand because they've been indoctrinated.

[pxmcc]

Originally Posted by RX792P

a bit off thread, but my opinion is we have become a three party nation.
Democrat
Republican (often called RINOs...which really translates to Republicans in Normal Operation)...an endangered species
MAGA

Some of the Republicans actually believe in spending restraint.

i would love to agree with you wholeheartedly, but the historical evidence suggests that Republicans only care about a balanced budget when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.

i do agree tho that maggies are on a whole nother level of fiscal fuckery. Trump cares absolutely nothing about the future fiscal health of this country. he's totally fine with driving it into bankruptcy so long as he and his fellow robber barrons can party now like it's 1999..

[adav8s28]

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

We’re almost to the point where we’re going to have to take some calamitous actions to rectify our problems. A good first start is solving our Social Security funding so that it will continue to last for the foreseeable future.

Secondly a serious debate on raising taxes up to same levels as before the first bush tax cuts.

Thirdly a straight up 5% to 10% spending cut across the board for every single government program except SS.

We’re going to have to get serious people to work out these issues and come up with a solution that the majority of congress can live with.

+1

Good post Txdot!

1. I would leave your #1 as is. The formula needs to be changed to fix social security since the birthrate has decreased in the USA.

2. In addition to going back to the tax tables before the Bush43 tax cuts in 2000, I would move the corporate tax rate from 20% to 25%.

3. In addition to leaving Social Security alone, I would not touch The ACA (Obamacare), Original Medicaid (signed into law by LBJ in 1965) and Medicare Part D (signed into law by Bush43). The healthcare system in the USA is complicated but with the addition of the ACA 90% of the USA population has some type of medical coverage. If you make cuts to this you will end up with less people covered. Plus, as Tiny would say cuts to the system would lead to less favorable outcomes.

If the rolling debt for the USA is 35 trillion, we will need one trillion dollar surpluses for 35 straight years to clear the debt. Going back to the tax tables before the Bush tax cuts is a good place to start.

https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1999

[Turner2099]

Originally Posted by adav8s28

If the rolling debt for the USA is 35 trillion, we will need one trillion dollar surpluses for 35 straight years to clear the debt. Going back to the tax tables before the Bush tax cuts is a good place to start.

https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1999

I asked Claude.AI, "Looking at the current economic environment, which would be better for the country, reversing the George W Bush tax cuts or reversing the One Big Beautiful Bill?"

## The Current Fiscal Reality

First, the baseline you need to understand how dire things are:

The FY 2025 deficit was $1.8 trillion — the result of $5.2 trillion in revenue and $7.0 trillion in spending. Interest payments on the national debt hit $970 billion, surpassing national defense and becoming the third-largest federal expenditure behind only Social Security and Medicare.

Under current projections, debt held by the public will rise from 100% of GDP today to 120% of GDP by 2035, with deficits totaling $22.7 trillion over the next decade and net interest payments rising from $1 trillion in 2025 to $1.8 trillion by 2035.

Net interest payments are projected to rise from 3.2% of GDP in 2025 to 6.3% in 2054 under current law — far exceeding the previous historical peak of 3.2% in 1991. Rising interest payments alone account for more than 100% of the increase in the unified deficit through 2054.

In plain English: **interest on the debt is now the engine driving the fiscal crisis.** The hole is compounding.

## The Bush Cuts Don't Exist Anymore — Practically Speaking

This is the crucial catch: the Bush tax cuts were **already substantially absorbed into current law.** Most of them were made permanent in 2012 (the "fiscal cliff" deal under Obama), and then the 2017 TCJA further restructured the tax code on top of them. Reversing the Bush cuts now would mean clawing back income tax rate structures that have been baked in for over a decade — politically nearly impossible and economically disruptive in a different way than simply not passing a new law.

The OBBBA, by contrast, was signed in 2025. **It is current, active, and has not yet compounded.** Much of its fiscal damage is still in front of us.

## What Reversing Each One Would Mean RIGHT NOW

### Reversing the OBBBA

CBO estimates the OBBBA will add $3.4 trillion to primary deficits, $718 billion in interest costs, and a total of $4.1 trillion to the debt through 2034. Reversing it now — before those costs fully materialize — would mean that projected trajectory never happens. You'd be stopping a bleeding wound before the blood loss compounds.

Under an alternative scenario where OBBBA's temporary provisions are made permanent and interest rates stay elevated, debt could reach 134% of GDP by 2035. Reversal would prevent that worst-case scenario.

Additionally, OBBBA would add $500 billion to the deficit in 2026 and $635 billion in 2027 alone. These are near-term hits that reversal would stop almost immediately.

### Reversing the Bush Cuts

The honest answer here is that the opportunity cost of those cuts was enormous in historical terms — they turned Clinton-era surpluses into structural deficits. But reversing them *today* would essentially mean raising income tax rates back to pre-2001 levels on brackets that have been legally in place for 13+ years. The revenue recovery would be significant on paper but the political and economic disruption would be enormous, and much of the damage to the debt trajectory has already happened and compounded through two wars, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, and years of interest on accumulated debt.

## The Bottom Line: Which Reversal Would Benefit the Country More *Right Now*?

**Reversing the OBBBA would be more impactful for the country's current financial health**, and here's why:

**Timing:** The OBBBA's biggest costs are still ahead. Reversing it now is like stopping a dam from breaking rather than trying to drain a flood after the fact. The Bush cuts' damage is largely already baked into the existing debt mountain.

**Interest compounding:** CBO estimates that a $1 increase in the federal deficit reduces private investment by 33 cents, and average long-run interest rates increase by 2 basis points for every 1 percentage point increase in debt as a percentage of GDP. Every dollar of deficit the OBBBA adds now triggers a multiplying interest cost for decades. Stopping it stops that compounding.

**Scale at current debt levels:** With debt already at ~100% of GDP, adding $4.1 trillion more is far more dangerous than it would have been in 2001, when debt was around 32% of GDP. The same dollar of deficit does much more damage now because it piles onto a much larger and more fragile base.

**Practical feasibility:** Reversing a law passed months ago is far more politically and legally realistic than re-litigating a tax structure that's been law for 13+ years and is deeply embedded in financial planning across the economy.

**The caveat:** Supporters of the OBBBA would argue its growth provisions — particularly business investment incentives like 100% bonus depreciation — could stimulate enough productivity to partially offset costs. But as NBER researchers note, even optimistic productivity growth scenarios (0.5 percentage points above forecast annually) only reduce the 2054 debt-to-GDP ratio from 199% to about 158% — still catastrophic. The math simply doesn't work in the bill's favor.

In short: the Bush tax cuts were a more consequential historical mistake, but reversing the OBBBA would do more good *today* because you'd be preventing future damage rather than trying to undo the past.

[rooster]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^

That's surprisingly good. Better than I expected....

.

[adav8s28]

Originally Posted by Turner2099

I asked Claude.AI, "Looking at the current economic environment, which would be better for the country, reversing the George W Bush tax cuts or reversing the One Big Beautiful Bill?"

Considering the size of the deficits the Federal Government has been running since 2001, I would say the tax table needs to change. The 7th tax bracket should have a tax rate percentage of at least 40%. We are never going to see a surplus again if we don't change the tax tables.

The only way to reduce the rolling debt is to have Federal Government budget surpluses. The last one was in 2001 for $130 billion.

https://economicsinsider.com/us-fiscal-deficit-by-year/

[pxmcc]

^^ya, you gotta go back to what worked. we weren't standing in bread lines during Clinton II while we were finally running a surplus and paying down the debt. anything else is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.