"Big Beautiful Blob" Keeps Getting More Bloated

“Big Beautiful Bill” can’t stop growing. This pile of pork that required two pallet boards and a forklift in order to move him from the House side of the Capitol building to the Senate, is getting fatter with each passing day. It may not even be possible, at this point, to move him from congress to the President’s desk for signing.

It seems Trumpublicans, who once masqueraded as budget hawks, just cannot spend enough money these days. Having already packed in more pork than the entire nation of China could eat in a decade at a time when the US is drowning in its own debt according to every credit agency that typically matters, Senate Republicans saw the need to fit a lot more fat into the flesh folds of this cut-taxes-and-spend-more, fantasy monster.

Having loaded Bill’s crevices up with lard, we read today that this big butt-full of bills is now sprinting like a morbidly obese walrus for the finish line, but is likely to die of a heart attack before it arrives (for the simple reason I’ll state after the next quote).

I’ll let Counterpoint, my frequent source for cartoons, give you the quick-and-dirty takedown of this budgetary beast, which they’ve renamed “Big Beautiful Bull.” Having used that play on words for the title of my weekend Deeper Dive, I’ll just call it “Big Beautiful Blob” because of the even more unsightly mess it has morphed into:

Just when Senate Republicans thought they were putting a bow on President Trump’s legislative magnum poopus—The One Big Beautiful Bill Act—House Republicans have emerged like hangry pirates, declaring mutiny over what they see as a bloated, off-brand version of their precious tax-and-slash blueprint.

What began as a bloated, hardline conservative dream—featuring sweeping tax cuts, a crackdown on immigration, and a bon voyage to Medicaid spending—has now morphed into an even more bloated Senate remix full of surprises, like leftover Biden-era clean energy credits and less gratuitous Medicaid cruelty than originally planned. Scandalous.

Things got worse when the Senate’s budget referee (a.k.a. the parliamentarian) red-carded several House wish-list items, including the all-important "deport-them-out-of-Medicaid" clause. Meanwhile, the bill’s tab ballooned like a post-tax-cut deficit, possibly adding trillions more than the already eye-popping $3.3 trillion House version. But hey, what’s a few trillion among friends?

Still, the raucous Freedom Caucus isn’t amused. “This is a nonstarter,” Rep. Ralph Norman grumbled, pounding the table of fiscal purity while perched on a mountain of previous cave-ins to fiscal defilement. Yet history isn’t on the rebels' side: every time they’ve threatened to walk, they’ve ended up slithering back to vote “yes.”

Then there’s the high-stakes SALT deduction drama. House Republicans from blue states won a hard-fought concession to raise the cap, but the Senate shredded it like Trump’s old tax returns. Now, moderates are fuming that their one legislative souvenir was jettisoned.

Meanwhile, rural Republicans are panicking over Medicaid cuts that will likely kneecap their local hospitals—turns out, some parts of the country still rely on public health care. Even Sen. Susan Collins is scrambling to salve the wound with a Band-Aid of $100 billion.

Senate GOP leaders, however, are trying to speedwalk the bill to Trump’s desk before Independence Day fireworks, because nothing says freedom like a multi-trillion-dollar debt bomb dressed up in red, white, and tax breaks.

Despite the outrage, insiders predict the holdouts will do what they always do—complain loudly, wave a flag of fiscal doom, then wither like spineless tarts. After all, nothing unites Republicans like a giant tax cut and a promise from Trump that “this time, it’s gonna be beautiful. Really.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Big Beautiful Blob” has gone up from adding $3.3-trillion to the budget, over where we would be if we let the Trump Tax Cuts from the president’s first term expire, to adding $3.9-trillion. It also falls short of meeting House “reconciliation” rules that allowed easier passage of the House version without. So, if the Senate doesn’t get realistic about that, Big Beautiful Blob could be dead on arrival when it goes back to the House for the revote required after Senate revisions are made to a House bill.

Even the CBO notes,

… these numbers understate the potential costs of the bill, since the legislation relies on a number of arbitrary expirations. Borrowing could rise by another $1 trillion – to $5 trillion or more – if temporary provisions were made permanent.

Not only that: The CBO’s numbers also likely underestimate where interest costs will be after “Big Beautiful Blob” throws its monstrous weight behind the damage tariffs will do to the dollar and simultaneously to the Treasury market because right now investors are still, as I wrote in my last Deeper Dive, hanging onto fantasies that more time for negotiation means more chance of tariffs coming down. That includes bond investors who have bought the bull.

Trump also has made clear in his boasting that the only thing he considers a great deal is when he victoriously gets other nations to allow the US to place higher tariffs on its own citizens than those nations levy on their citizens…. Trumpian logic says that the nation that gets to have the highest tariffs is the winner! Those are the deals he’s bragged about.

The markets still have not figured out the linchpin that I warned my paying subscribers about many months ago, which is that tariffs will drive interest rates on the government debt up by diminishing the need for central banks all around the world to hold Treasuries as their primary vehicle for reconciling their member banks’ foreign exchanges on trade with the US. Less trade equals less utility for those Treasury holdings, which means less demand, so higher interest. A falling dollar also means less foreign demand for Treasuries because foreign investors lose money on the exchange rate when they sell the treasuries and go back to their own currency.

That will all happen because Treasuries are effectively the money bags that exchange currency typically travels in via the click of a computer key reassigning ownership. There is still no one that I read who is paying attention to that likely trigger for the United States’ ultimate debt death spiral. Because no on is seeing it, there is all the more likelihood it will take us down.

And, of course, the rise in Treasury interest means a rise in all commercial interest that is pegged off of benchmark Treasuries. “Big Beautiful Blob,” throwing its weight onto the Treasury heap, only makes the problem worse. It also increases the risk that no one sees tariffs as causing the spike in interest rates because they have the Blob to blame as a scapegoat.

Now, the CBOs deficit costs are conservative if you compare them to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which places the likely addition to the nation’s deficit, over what it would be if the Trump Tax cuts expired, as high as $4.5-trillion.

One thing is certain, though, this porky bill has surely got the entire military industrial complex slavering because the dripping fat has never looked so rich to them as it does in this bill. From a president who led us to believe we would stop wasting US treasure on endless foreign wars, we nevertheless, get a budget that spends more than ever before in getting ready for unknown wars.

Elon Musk calls the Senate version “utterly insane,” but that, of course, is because it would raise taxes (by eliminating credits) or cut Biden subsidies on many solar, battery, geothermal, wind and nuclear energy projects—all the stuff he uses or builds.

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote on X, the social network that he owns.

Musk says the Senate had better kill Bill.

Elon Musk slammed President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” budget bill, yet again, on Monday, but this time went so far as to call for the formation of a new political party to stop Trump’s “insane” deficit spending.

“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” Musk wrote on X, adding:

Since “Big Beautiful Blob” does now include a big beautiful debt-ceiling hike-to-end-all-hikes (for another two years) as dessert, I agree; just not for Musk’s conflicting business reasons.

Musk followed his post up with another, jabbing the House Freedom Caucus, whose members mostly voted for the House version of the bill. “How can you call yourself the Freedom Caucus if you vote for a DEBT SLAVERY bill with the biggest debt ceiling increase in history?” Musk asked

Indeed. This budget bomb is likely to be more obliterating to the US future than those bombs the US just dropped in Iran, which multiple reports are now saying were not all that Trump boasted them up to be.

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