The Big Beautiful Bill Is Hanging by a Thread

[Passages]

There is so much unfinished business that some Republicans in Washington are saying the unsayable: Just drop it.

by David Dayen May 12, 2025

Back on January 6, a day when important things tend to happen, I wrote about a quietly important moment in the as-yet-not-begun Trump presidency. Deciding whether to split up his agenda into multiple parts or to combine all of his tax cuts and all of his spending cuts into one overstuffed piece of legislation, Trump opted for the latter, calling it the “one big beautiful bill.” At the time, Speaker Mike Johnson surmised that everything could get wrapped up by “April or May.”

I said back then that one-bill agendas tended to fail, because they offer plentiful targets for opposition and maddening coalitional choices that typically leave everyone bruised and upset. “Each day without a legislative accomplishment will both grate on the president and amp up the discord,” I wrote. “The one-bill strategy heightens the possibility of getting nothing done, or at least the possibility of scaling back ambitions and only getting a fraction passed.”

Fortunately, Republicans didn’t listen to me. And now they are in their familiar stage of recriminations, anger, and desperation, which is already leading to scaling back ambitions and only getting a fraction passed.

SNIP
To be clear, this is a narrow problem for a narrow group of fairly wealthy people. Most Americans do not itemize deductions, and most Americans do not pay more than $10,000 in state and local taxes. But the well-off people in suburban blue-state districts who care about this are also the kind of people who fund and vote for Republicans specifically to get this kind of tax break.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-05-12-big-beautiful-bill-hanging-by-a-thread/

[nitpicked]

1. One doesn't have to be rich to be SALTed

Just be Amazoned.

For some unknown reason (ha ha), my property tax alone is now over 10K a year.

Once the state taxes my pension, that adds on.

IF the standard deduction does not revert, this would not matter.

BUT if it does go back to the $8350 for single people, then it does matter.

[underpants]

2. Yeah the standard is $15k now

Mostly done, as I understand it, to simplify tax return processing.

[Kaleva]

3. 10,000 is 71% of my yearly income

Prior to me going back to work part time.