Senate approves large attractive legislation (07-02-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] So yes, after what do they call that thing, the Votarama, where they just kept changing the one big beautiful bill, the O-B-B-B-B-B. And they just kept changing it and voting on stuff and, you know, doing bribes to various senators to get them to sign off on it. And by the way, that, you know, that happens all the time with this stuff in very, you know, close bodies like you've got in the Senate.

[00:00:58] They could only afford to lose the three votes from the Republicans that they did lose, right? If they had lost a fourth, then it would have failed. And so they had to they had to do the Alaska purchase, right? With Murkowski, they had to cut her a deal. And if any of this sounds familiar, this is how Obamacare got done, too. They ran that thing through with the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback, the Florida.

[00:01:28] What was the Florida one? Yeah, that guy lost his seat. Bill Nelson, I think was his name. Yeah. So he had these Democrat senators that had, you know, anxiety about Obamacare and passing it. And so they gave them all sorts of carve outs for their states so they would not be held to the, you know, all of the structure of the program in the same way that all of the other states that didn't require bribes in order to get passed.

[00:01:59] So whenever you have a closely divided body, the. You know, your your swing vote becomes more powerful. If you are the deciding vote, you then get to dictate a lot of terms. And that's what Murkowski did when you had Collins come out against it. The Rand Paul, he was against it from the beginning. The floor speech from Tom Tillis before he said, you know, I'm out of here and I'm not running again. And and his beef was over the Medicaid stuff.

[00:02:28] That left Murkowski and they leaned on her to try to get her to vote yes. And she eventually did. Over in the House where the big the big beautiful bill now goes back to the House because the Senate changed it. So the House had passed a version, sent it to the Senate. The Senate was like, no, we don't like it. And so they made all these changes in like 26 hours of voting and debating and. Horse trading.

[00:02:58] And so now it goes back to the House and they're actually, I think, debating it now, making all their floor speeches, you know, for their viral videos and campaign fundraising emails. And over there, I believe the split is 220, 220 Republicans to 212 Democrats. And if memory serves correctly, the original version in the House only passed by like a vote.

[00:03:24] So there's very little margin for error and or for for deviation from the president. And the president is sort of at the apex of his political capital right now, having, you know, won every single swing state, having, you know, moved the electorate to him in the last election. He has more political capital to get this stuff done.

[00:03:49] And, you know, when it comes to a guy like Tom Tillis, you don't have a very wide lane to drive down. Because every vote counts, every vote matters. And if you're going to cross the president, then you should expect to get the standard treatment from him on this stuff.

[00:04:15] If the Senate had a larger majority and Tillis's vote didn't matter, then and he could have voted no, but the thing still would have passed anyway. He would not probably have gotten the kind of barrage, the dog piling that he got from Trump and his followers on social media. So that's that's just the nature of of the game, right? So what is actually now in this bill?

[00:04:44] As it has been changed. So I think the the key thing to keep in mind is this is all about preserving the tax cuts that were initially passed back in 2017 that were set to expire. They were to sunset because that was the original legislation. This effort is to make these tax cuts permanent. OK, and then there's all this other garbage that's in there.

[00:05:13] All of the there because they don't do remember, they don't do earmarks anymore, like specifically earmarks where they would like lard up a bill with all sorts of pork. So this is how you now do it. So there's a bunch of stuff that's in there. And obviously you're talking about government accounting. And so the government accounting is always really weird, too. Like you've probably heard. The oh, is going to add to the deficit.

[00:05:43] Right. And I was not aware of this, but the congressional budget office, when they do their estimates, or at least for this bill, they started from a position that the tax cuts would expire. Because that's the current law. Rather than saying this is a continuation of the tax cuts, so the current revenue would remain the same. So what they did then was to say, oh, the tax cuts then expire.

[00:06:12] So there would be all of this revenue being collected in taxes because the tax cuts expired. And so if you were to pass this big, beautiful bill, then that revenue now goes away. But the revenue never comes back. Right. If it's an extension, it never comes back. So why would you score the bill as if the tax cuts went away, the revenue came back?

[00:06:41] Why would you bother doing that? Because if you start from that position, then, yeah, the CBO says that it's going to increase the deficit by almost $3.3 trillion over a decade. That's a nearly $1 trillion increase over the House-passed bill, which the CBO projected would add $2.4 trillion to the debt over a decade. But Republicans disputed the CBO estimates.

[00:07:12] They said, well, here's what the AP reports. They are using a different budget baseline that assumes the Trump tax cuts expiring in December have already been extended, essentially making them cost-free in the budget, which to me, that makes sense. That's the whole point of the bill. That's why they're doing this.

[00:07:39] And that's why they're doing it on this artificial deadline that Donald Trump set to have it done by July 4th because America, you know, and get the PR branding out of that. Like, I understand that. That's fine. It doesn't matter to me. But it is an artificial deadline. Will they meet it? I don't know. Are they trying to? It seems like it. But they want this. They want the debt ceiling issue. They want the tax cuts preserved, right? These are the things that are driving this train.

[00:08:06] And it seems to me like if the primary purpose is to extend the tax cuts, you should score the bill based on those tax cuts staying in place, not scoring the bill as if, hey, we got a bunch more revenue. Oh, and then it went away because it never comes back. If it's just being extended, if the tax cuts are just being extended,

[00:08:32] the CBO then released a separate analysis of the GOP's preferred approach. They did this over the weekend and found that the Senate bill would reduce deficits by about $500 billion. Well, that's a pretty big swing. You went from a $3.3 trillion deficit projection to a deficit reduction of $500 billion.

[00:09:03] So keeping the tax cuts constant, scoring it that way, it leads to a deficit reduction, which I think is a good thing, right? Isn't that what we want to see happen, a reduction in the deficit? Democrats and economists decry the GOP's approach as magic math that obscures the true costs of the tax breaks.

[00:09:29] If you believe all of the money belongs to the government rather than the American people, because that's at the heart of that argument, which is that we can't let people keep their own money. We have to bring that money to us. The government needs that money. We have to raise people's taxes. That's what a vote against this was.

[00:09:51] If you voted against this bill, it was a vote to allow the tax cuts to expire and a $3.3 trillion tax increase to hit Americans. Who, by the way, every American got tax cuts in the 2017 deal. Every one of us. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain? And Cabins of Asheville is your connection.

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[00:11:14] Call or text 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Here's an email to Pete at thepetecalendorshow.com from Dave regarding the Senate holdouts on the big, beautiful bill. If the holdouts get their bribes for a yay vote, why don't all senators act like they're going to hold out to get stuff for their state?

[00:11:45] That's a good question. So I think, first off, you have a lot of senators that are very much pro-Trump, right? So they're not going to try to impede Trump's work because they're just like, he's my guy, I'm going to do it, you know, it's not perfect, but whatever. And they'll go out there and sell this thing because they are loyal to the president, right? So you take that group out of the mix, obviously take all the Democrats out of the mix because they're going to vote no regardless.

[00:12:15] Then you have some Republicans that are in purple states or in states where winning as a Republican is more difficult. That's like Tom Tillis. That's Susan Collins up in Maine. Rand Paul is just always a no on these types of spending bills. And then you've got some that maybe aren't, you know, loyal so much to the president.

[00:12:42] They don't really, they're just kind of like MAGA adjacent. You know, they're not really comfortable with it. They're kind of biding their time on stuff. But maybe they're institutionalists. And so if the leadership says you need to vote this way, then they're going to do it, right? They're going to follow their leadership. And that's John Thune now. And so that's why you have like the whip counts, you know, the Senate majority whip. And that's what they do. They whip the votes. They make sure everybody's going to go along.

[00:13:11] And just because they don't hold out at the very end doesn't mean that they didn't get something for their state earlier in the process or something that they wanted. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in this bill that changed when it came over from the House. So I suspect some of these senators got what they wanted through the normal horse trading and they didn't have to hold out in order to get it. Does that make sense? And then there's also fear of Donald Trump.

[00:13:42] There are some senators that do not want to get dogpiled by Trump and his online army, right? They don't want that headache. So they'll just go along. That's part of it, too. And I don't know who fits into which camp. I'm just throwing out different ideas as to why everybody doesn't do the holdouts. And that's what the Freedom Caucus has been doing in the House for years, much to the chagrin of the, quote unquote, establishment Republican leadership. Right.

[00:14:12] So let's go into some of the details here from the big, beautiful bill. Tax cuts and deductions. We'll start here. This is from the Business Standard. At the center of the bill is a permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was set to expire at the end of this year. The legislation locks in lower income tax rates, the ones that we have right now, as well as our current standard deduction.

[00:14:40] And it extends various business friendly provisions. There is the provision, for example, no tax on tips. So there's a federal income tax exemption for income made through tips, which I think I'm now going to go to a strictly tip salary position. I'm going to ask my employer to simply pay me in tips. At a regular level every two weeks.

[00:15:11] This exemption would be up to $25,000 a year. And the benefit phases out if you earn more than $150,000. So if you are making $150,000 and you work for tips, it would start phasing out. Your exemption starts phasing out after the $150,000. But if you're making $150,000 doing tips, you're doing very, very well. You're very good at your job. It also permanently expands the standard deduction.

[00:15:42] It increases the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200,000 per child. Now it requires only one parent to have a Social Security number as well. Social Security income deduction. A $6,000 income deduction for retirees that earn under $75,000 a year. Plus a temporary $4,000 senior deduction which phases out over three years.

[00:16:12] These provisions amount to more than $4.5 trillion in tax reductions over the next decade. According to the House estimates. So $4.5 trillion in tax deductions. But remember, like three of that is from the tax cuts that were already put on the books in 2017. That are now just going to continue. There are Medicaid reforms.

[00:16:40] Starting December 2026. So not this year. But next year. End of next year. Able-bodied, childless adults must work. Or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. To qualify for Medicaid. Right? So unless you're disabled, if you are, if you're disabled, this is, that's a separate thing.

[00:17:07] But if you are able-bodied, then you need to work or volunteer for 80 hours a month. Which is 20 hours a week. That's a, that's a part-time gig. That's less than a part-time gig. Right? Well, I mean, it's not less than, it's still a part-time gig. But like, a lot of part-timers, what, what's the cap on part-time? It's like 35, is it 35 hours a week?

[00:17:33] That is not a difficult bar to cross. Also, parents with children 15 and older would also be required to meet the 80-hour monthly threshold. And recipients must verify their income and residency every two years. There is a provider tax cap.

[00:17:59] This is what angered Tom Tillis because of the way the North Carolina Medicaid system got set up when they expanded it a year ago. By giving a big fat provider tax rebate, basically, to our hospital industry. I'm going to go into the details on this as well later on. And I covered it a couple days ago, but I feel like this is important.

[00:18:22] There's another piece written about the specifics of what North Carolina did and why Tillis was trying to get a carve-out. And that's the thing. If they had given North Carolina a carve-out, would Tillis have then voted for the bill? He may have. I don't know. Maybe he was trying to pull a Murkowski, right? He was trying to get a deal like she got.

[00:18:47] The, oh, they also are creating a $50 billion stabilization fund for rural hospitals. Okay? So if you hear Democrats talking about the closure of rural hospitals, they are either ignorant of or they want you to not know that there is a fund created for rural hospitals to stabilize them against whatever impact this might have.

[00:19:17] The Congressional Budget Office projects over 11 million people may lose Medicaid access if the bill is enacted. Well, if they work, they would retain it. Right? I mean, that's the idea. There are also these types of reforms as part of the food stamp program. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources.

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[00:20:35] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Here's a Pete tweet. It's from Eric who says, It's amazing how tax breaks are the only quote-unquote cost Democrats are ever able to identify. It's true. And I don't know. I don't know why that is.

[00:21:15] It's amazing how tax breaks are the only cost Democrats are ever able to identify. Right. The lack of the money coming in, they view it as a cost to them, to government. This is a loss to government. The fact that you get to keep your money is a loss to them.

[00:21:44] This is a cost. No. This is, this is, I'm trying to remember who it was that I first heard use this term, but it is completely accurate. I heard it at the state level where a Republican was criticizing the Democrats in the legislature for their profligate spending and their structural deficits that they ran for years and years.

[00:22:13] And the philosophy is see a penny, spend a penny. Any like if you, I mean, think about it. You're doing budget projections when you are drafting your budget because it's for the next year. So you're basing these things on projections. And when you end up taking in more money than you projected you would actually receive. The Democrat philosophy is automatically is to spend it. Oh, we took in more money than we thought we were going to take in. Yay.

[00:22:43] We can spend it now. And that's how we ended up with structural deficits because you kept spending and the revenue then would drop off. It would be lower than expected. And now you had no money. And that's why Republicans, when they took over, they, you know, beefed up their rainy day fund. And several times in the last, what, 15 years since Republicans have taken control of the General Assembly in Raleigh, they've given the money back to the taxpayers.

[00:23:14] They've sent it back. They're like, we took in too much than we projected. So here's a refund. We didn't mean to take all of that. One of the changes in the big, beautiful bill is for food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And I heard Ben Shapiro mention this on his podcast, I think last night. He said, it's supplemental. Supplemental.

[00:23:41] It's not supposed to pay for all your food. It's supplemental. It's supposed to help supplement. And that's why if you're going to do the work requirements for able-bodied people for Medicaid, it makes sense to do it for SNAP or food stamps.

[00:24:03] And the Senate bill has a range of, well, they have a range of reimbursements that are going to be based on the error rates. Okay, so you have states that are administering the programs with money from the feds. And they make mistakes. They have people on the rolls that shouldn't be on the rolls and that sort of thing.

[00:24:32] And they monitor this stuff. They audit this stuff. And they find out, oh, my gosh, you have a lot of people on your rolls because you've just approved everybody. And that's a high error rate. So states that have error rates above 6% would have to pay anywhere from 5% to 15% of the program costs.

[00:24:53] So if you as a state are administering this program and you're just giving it out to people who otherwise are not eligible for it, but you just don't care because you just want to soak up all the federal money. And they find out that you've got an error rate above 6%. Well, now you're going to have to start paying for it because you're supposed to be monitoring this. You're supposed to be, you know, screening people out and making sure there's not waste, fraud, and abuse.

[00:25:19] They also raise the age limit for work-eligible, able-bodied adults without dependents. It's going from 54 years old up to 64 years old. So if you can work and you don't have any dependents and you're getting supplemental nutritional assistance, food stamps, you should work. State flexibility. Here's the Murkowski bribe, I mean, deal.

[00:25:46] Well, states like Alaska and Hawaii could receive waivers if they demonstrate good-faith efforts to comply. Because I guess Murkowski was worried that her state can't actually get an error rate below 6%. I guess that's the problem there. Let's head over to the phones here. This is Dave. Welcome to the show. Hello, Dave. Hey, Pete. How's it going? Hey, good. What's up? All right.

[00:26:13] So we hear that Tom Tillis, you know, and like Rand Paul and, you know, and even Elon, you know, obviously the elected people don't, not supporting this. Elon is critical about the bill. And, you know, I hear he says pork, there's so much pork in there. And then you hear, you know, $5 trillion is going to be added to the deficit. So what exactly is that? And it's not a gotcha question. I just legitimately specifically talk about the specifics of that.

[00:26:40] So I think the $5 trillion number that you're talking about is the debt ceiling. Yes. Which is that. And so that's the debt that we've already. They're not passing a budget. They're just putting the ball again. And they're just putting that in there. Yeah, this is not a budget. Right. You are correct. This is not a budget. This is essentially like a continuing resolution. It's just a continuation. I don't like that. I don't either. What pork is in there?

[00:27:07] What are they spending stuff on that we should be irritated about? Right. Well, I mean, there are people that are irritated with the Medicaid reforms and the food stamp reforms that I've gone over. Sure, sure. I get that. Yeah, they're mad about that because that will generate or allow the, it's not going to generate revenue. It'll allow the federal government to not spend as much money on these programs. That's the big chunk of how they're paying for it.

[00:27:36] Now, the, for the debt ceiling, I think the House version was like $4 trillion. The Senate version is $5 trillion. And they're doing that in order to not have to come back and have a government shutdown deadline looming for them before the next election. That's what they're, that's what they're trying to do is to kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling. Yeah. That's the $5 trillion. They need a budget. They need a budget. I agree. I agree. I'm not, I'm not happy about all of this.

[00:28:04] I understand why they're doing it, but I'm not happy. What are, we're like Rand Paul and Tom Tillis's specific, you know, problems with it that they didn't vote for it. So, uh, I, so I did, uh, I covered this in depth on Monday when Tillis announced that he was not, no, it's all right. Uh, when he was running, he was not going to run for reelection. And, uh, I, I played his floor speech where he was railing against this Medicaid reform structure. Um, Rand Paul is against it because it's not paid for. Rand Paul wants a balanced budget.

[00:28:34] You could plug your podcast now. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thepeatpod.com. But, uh, so you can go back and listen to the Monday episode, but I'm actually going to, I'm going to circle back like Pisaki would. And, uh, I'm going to circle back on, on Tillis's argument on the Medicaid, uh, issue because it's, to me, it's, it's pretty offensive. The, the argument that he was making on this, because it's basically a scam and I'm going to, I will get back to that. Um, but that's the 5 trillion. Dave, I appreciate the call, man. Uh, the 5 trillion figure is the debt ceiling. You know, stories are powerful.

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[00:30:00] And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creativevideo.com. Charles C.W. Cook, who's a national treasure, even though he's from Britain, but he's an American citizen now. He made this point yesterday on a podcast. I think it was the Megyn Kelly podcast.

[00:30:17] He said that something to always keep in mind with GovCo accounting and the rhetoric around it is that a cut is not a reduction in the rate of growth. Okay? That's not a cut.

[00:30:36] So if the Congressional Budget Office comes out and they're like, you know, we are seeing or we're projecting that growth is going to be like growth in a government program. It's going to be 3% each year. Over the next 10 years. 3% each year over 10 years. And then the Senate is like, yeah, you know what? We're going to limit that to 2% growth.

[00:31:02] And then that gets framed as a cut because it's not growing at the rate that the CBO predicted or projected or wanted or whatever. Like they're not the same things. You and I don't do our budgets like this. We don't see these things as cuts. If you're like, hey, you know what?

[00:31:22] I spend $100 a week eating out and I'm going to just keep that level for the whole next year too rather than increase it. I'm going to keep it level. You would not say, well, I wanted to take it to $150 a week eating out in my budget, but I'm going to keep it at $100. You wouldn't say that I'm cutting $50 out of my budget because you're not.

[00:31:48] You're maintaining a $100 a week dining out budget. What else is in the large attractive legislation or the big beautiful bill? Wall construction. Yeah, remember that? Remember that promise? Build a wall. Just got 10 feet taller. There is an allocation of $46.5 billion for wall construction and maintenance along the southern border.

[00:32:16] This will also include cameras and other kinds of tech to help with the border security. They're going to increase detention capacity. So they are expanding detention facilities, which is actually a big part of the issue that now ICE and Border Patrol are running into where they don't have a lot of space to house the people that they're collecting, right? While they await deportation.

[00:32:43] So they've got $45 billion earmarked for increased detention capacity, along with another $30 billion to hire, train, and purchase equipment for more U.S. immigration and customs enforcement personnel. Also, there's a $100 fee for asylum seekers.

[00:33:09] Now, the House proposal set the fee at $1,000, but that now got knocked back to $100 fee. This is an offensive part of the bill to me, which is the state and local tax deduction. State and local tax deduction, which is SALT, S-A-L-T. State and local taxes. Under the current law, it is capped at $10,000.

[00:33:38] So if you live in a high-tax state, a.k.a. Democrat-controlled states, and they tax you a whole bunch of money, you get to deduct $10,000 of it. Which means what? Which means subsidies for high-tax states. The Senate bill increases the cap to $40,000, but it's only for four years, or five years.

[00:34:06] After that, the cap would go back to $10,000. And this is to satisfy a bunch of Republicans from high-tax states. The SALT Caucus, they call themselves. That was their bribes that they needed. The bill raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. That exceeds the $4 trillion hike in the House version. This provision is intended to avoid a potential standoff over government borrowing later this year,

[00:34:34] with Treasury officials warning that the U.S. could run out of funds by August. Fiscal conservatives have criticized this provision, calling it a betrayal of Republican pledges to rein in spending. Which, yeah, it is. Yeah, it absolutely is. And then I mentioned Lisa Murkowski. The bill seeks to impose spending cuts on food stamps and Medicaid.

[00:35:01] Murkowski from Alaska was worried that the strict cuts would disproportionately affect her state, Alaska, which relies heavily on federal funding for those programs. Senators eventually agreed to exempt Alaska from potential changes to food stamps and to increase federal funding for rural hospitals over the next five years by $25 billion. And senators also removed a solar and wind tax from the bill, hoping to appease Murkowski.

[00:35:28] She walked away unhappy with the bill, but she still voted yes. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.