Outside the Beltway

The Budget and the GOP’s Morals

Budgets are choices and choices reveal values.

Steven L. Taylor · Saturday, May 24, 2025 · 11 comments

It is often noted that budgets reveal much about what morals their authors hold. Well, the budget bill that is making its way through Congress is saying a lot about what the Republican Party values. And unlike many other policy issues, this is really more about long-term, core GOP beliefs than it is about the Trump era of the GOP. I say that not to let Trump off the hook, as his oligarchic avarice is part of this story as well, but he just isn’t the main driver.

I have already written about the bill here, but was struck by the following from the latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show, which was a discussion of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” or as Klein called it, “Trump’s Big Budget Bomb,” with columnist Catherine Rampell.

Here’s Klein making a key point about who wins and who loses.

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 will lose health insurance.

It’s also grimly exact. 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.

I know many conservatives believe that people should get to keep more of their earnings and that the social safety net is too generous, among other critiques of social welfare policy. There are serious and complex debates that can be had about these topics. But the fact that there might be abstract justification for these policy choices does not take away the moral consequences of the choices being made in the now.

Even if one wishes to argue some principle about the money in question not belonging to the federal government, but to the earners, that does not feed the child who needs SNAP, nor does it heal the worker who needs Medicaid to pay for medical care.

Life is about choices, and there are almost always compromises to be made. At some point, one has to ask if the truly moral choice is that someone making a substantial income deserves a tax cut (that most will not even truly notice) or whether we want poorer people to have less food and medical care.

And if your go-to is to say things, “Why don’t you just pay more taxes,” you are deflecting from the real choice that is being made. And the answer to that rejoinder is that this is a collective problem that cannot be solved by uncoordinated individual action. If it were solved that way, then the conservative fantasy about churches and charities fixing these social ills would have already come to pass, and we wouldn’t need social welfare programs.

There is also the moral notion here, and it has to do with just deserts. If you assume that the rich deserve all that they have because, well, they worked hard, and the poor deserve what they have because, well, they haven’t, that makes for a nice version of Economic Calvinism, but it also means you appear to never have met, you know, people. If the level of one’s wealth were a simple direct ratio of how hard people work, then the distribution of wealth would be a lot different.

Lots of people work hard, but that doesn’t mean they get wealthy (it may not even mean that they get by adequately). And there are plenty of lazy people with a lot of money. But we all understand that people who do hard manual labor don’t get paid the same as an attorney. There are reasons for this, not the least of which the skills and education to be a manual laborer are different from those to be an attorney. But at the end of the day, the issue is not one purely of hard work.

Moreover, the reason Person A is digging ditches and Person B is an attorney may have as much, if not more, to do with the backgrounds of the two Persons (i.e., where they were born, who their parents were, and so forth) than innate intelligence or work ethic. Indeed, it is possible that Person A has more raw talent for the law than does Person B, but the opportunity to discover that fact simply never existed.

But the GOP is making the moral argument that Person B needs a tax cut because he earned it! Never mind that Person A may end up struggling to feed his kid.

Back to the Klein during the conversation with Rampell.

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 are going to drive 13 million people off health insurance. We are going to end $300 billion of spending that gives food to hungry people. And that is going to pay for — depending on how you calculate it — roughly a quarter of tax cuts go to the top 1 percent. That’s the fundamental math of this bill.

CBS News noted in late 2024 that being in the top 1% of earners means, on average, an annual adjusted gross income of $787,712. The state you live in matters, and so there is a range (details at the link). But no matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of money.

Again, the issue is not some abstraction about the justification of taxation or of welfare policies. We are not arguing in a dorm room, nor are we playing a simulation game. We are talking about real choices that affect the lives of millions of real human beings.

What the House GOP is saying specifically is that they value slightly money in the pockets of wealthy people than they value the effects of welfare cuts in the lives of American citizens.

I will note that I haven’t even gotten into the issue of how much debt this adds without any notion of paying for it. That sends its own moral signal.

I will conclude by noting this from Klein’s intro to the podcast.

The Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about $500 billion over 10 years, and it paid for all of that spending — and more — through tax increases. The Affordable Care Act was expected to cost about a trillion dollars 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.

But the Big Budget Bomb exists in a class by itself. Even a naïve analysis, one that buys into some very obvious Republican budget tricks, finds that this bill, as it exists on May 21, cuts taxes and raises spending by more than $4 trillion over 10 years — but only pays for about $1.5 trillion of that.

This is just to underscore that it is possible to pay for things, and yet the choice is being made not to do so.