The deficit thing is the the least important part of the MAGA Murder Budget

I keep seeing articles about how the Republican budget is bad because it "explodes" the deficit or will add such and such amount to the debt. Former Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers have one today in the NYT. I'm honestly not sure what they're smoking, making this the line they want to hammer home. This is just so obviously the least important part of the bill.

Even if you limit yourself only to macroeconomic commentary on the bill, the change to the annual deficit compared to just continuing prior policy is still not the most relevant part. Sure, the deficit will increase a bit. But even with a narrow macroeconomic focus, the major change is not in the increase in net flows of financial wealth from the federal government to the private sector (which is what the deficit measures), it is changes in who those flows are going to. Less to regular people, more to a tiny number of very rich people.

Putting fairness aside for a moment, that's bad in purely conventional macroeconomic terms. GDP measures total gross spending. If you take $1,000 in income away from 1,000 regular people and give that cool million to one of the 10,000 wealthiest people on earth, there's no effect on the federal budget. But the 1,000 regular people are going to reduce their spending by close to $1,000 each, while the rich person's spending isn't going to change at all. So total spending drops. If you keep the government's net financial contribution to the private sector (the deficit) exactly the same but redistribute income upwards, that will reduce total spending (GDP) because of these secondary effects on spending behavior. This is really basic stuff.

Deficits tend to increase total spending (GDP). But the fact that there's a little extra deficit has almost no positive macroeconomic effect to counterbalance that redistribution, because that entire additional deficit is also going to rich people who won't spend it. The contractionary effect of the massive upwards redistribution is probably going to be more powerful than any kind of boost we'd get from a slightly bigger deficit.

But all of that is a digression. The macroeconomic stuff is bad. Recessions are avoidable and deadly. But the really bad stuff isn't the macroeconomic effects, which after all is famously difficult to forecast.

The real obvious unconscionable parts of this bill are the actual things that are in it: this is a MAGA murder budget.

It's 1,000 pages, so I don't know everything that's in it and frankly neither do most of the congresspeople voting on it. But the major stuff is: (1) give more money to rich people (2) direct vastly more resources towards grooming Trump's personal gestapo and beefing up their concentration camps, and (3) gut major systems that the majority of Americans rely on in our daily lives. The literal direct effects of these things are just so obviously worse than any quibbling about their fiscal effects could be.

The funneling money to rich people thing. The deficit-brained people (on the right and left) keep focusing on how the tax cuts for the rich affect the deficit. That is not the bad part. The bad part is that a tiny number of people are so rich that they are becoming increasingly dangerous to the rest of us, after decades of already being very dangerous to us. I guess it's a political question whether you think it's a good idea to give them more money; most Americans do not.

The gestapo thing. The ICE stuff is already really, really bad. Masked men with no badges or identification are snatching people off the streets without charging them with a crime or any kind of pretense of legality, sometimes for how they look, other times for something they said. Rando cosplaying lookalikes are pretending to be ICE and there's no plausible way to tell the difference. People are being stopped and asked to show their proof of citizenship, something that American citizens are not legally required to carry, but which a noncitizen can be detained for. (Read that twice.) The administration has deported literal US citizens. They have repeatedly mused about "denaturalization" and stripping citizenship from people born in the US. Many are sent to concentration camps—prisons full of people who aren't charged with or convicted of anything—both in the US and in other countries like El Salvador. All of this is dressed in way over the top language about threats to national security and even to civilization itself—as such things always are. Really the very last thing we need is increase their budget by over $100 billion while arbitrarily capping resources to immigration courts already struggling to keep up with backlogs. It's bad, and incidentally, most Americans agree. The billions of dollars is not the problem; where it's going is.

The defunding American communities thing. Then there's the cuts. The biggest deepest cuts are to Medicaid and SNAP, both extremely popular programs that a very large number of Americans rely on at some point during their lives, and the vast majority of Americans want to keep. A Spanish poet once declared that he would always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. Some people feel a lot of anger towards those very people instead. I don't understand that, but if that's you, then this next part's for you. This bill actually mostly doesn't defund low income Americans directly, it defunds their hospitals and grocery stores which are very often also your hospitals and grocery stores—that's directly where the payments from these programs go. Most hospitals in the US, for example, cannot operate without Medicaid. This isn't a dial you can just slowly turn down, and only the poor get hurt: the cost of actually providing the service (in the form of personnel time spent, drugs given, etc) is a small fraction of a hospital's cost, because most of the cost goes towards the infrastructure required for the hospital and its services to exist in the first place, and those costs are defrayed over all services billed. A hospital delivering fewer services for less money isn't a wash financially for that hospital: it's a death sentence.

This bill is a murder budget. Anyone obsessing about the dollar figure for the deficit here is completely missing the plot.