06.24.25

Merkley: When Using Authentic Accounting, Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Costs $4.2 Trillion Over 10 Years

Republicans Previously Directed JCT to Score the Senate Finance Tax Title Using the Budget Gimmick That Showed It Costing a Fraction

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, using the current law baseline which is enshrined in law and takes into account the real cost of a bill, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) provided its score on the Senate Finance Committee’s portion of the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” showing that it will cost $4.2 trillion over 10 years. Recently, Senate Republicans directed JCT to use a budget gimmick known as “current policy baseline” – to make these regressive tax giveaways to the wealthy falsely appear to add little to the national debt. This artificial baseline suggests the tax portion of the bill only adds about $440 billion to the debt over 10 years, which is wrong.

“After using authentic accounting to tally the true cost of the revenue portion of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Betrayal of a bill, we finally see that those provisions will add $4.2 trillion to the national debt over 10 years,” said Ranking Member Jeff Merkley. “This is an astronomically irresponsible cost for a bill where the only real purpose is to fund tax breaks for billionaires. Don’t believe Republicans when they try and float their ‘magic math’ to claim this bill will only cost a fraction of what it will really cost. It’s fiscally reckless and dishonest. This is the Great Betrayal of working families where families lose, and billionaires win.” 

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