This article is from SRN News
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, said he’d spoken with Trump recently about the bill after his promise that at least four senators were willing to hold the bill unless steeper cuts to the deficit were made.
“My main sticking point is the debt ceiling. If they strip the debt ceiling off, there’s a lot of things I would vote for,” said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul said that he told Trump this would be the first time in recent history that Republicans would “own” the debt ceiling if an increase of the nation’s debt limit was included in the GOP’s sweeping tax and spending package.
“My target for the next fiscal year (is) $6.5 trillion,” said Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. Senators, Scott said, must “go line by line through the budget” to achieve “pre-pandemic levels of spending.” Scott added that he’d recently conveyed this to Trump.
The White House has defended the bill against critics who claim the debt is snowballing under Trump.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing last Thursday by saying she wanted “to debunk some false claims” about his tax cuts.
Leavitt said the “blatantly wrong claim that the ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill’ increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson piled onto Congress’ number crunchers on Sunday, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they’re always off, every single time, when they project economic growth. They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations.”
But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together.
“We have to get a lot of votes,” Trump said last week. “We can’t be cutting.”
That has left administration officials betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick. And they point to the tremendous economic growth in Mr. Trump’s first term after Congress passed his tax cut plan.
Brought to you by www.srnnews.com
