The American people didn’t save our country on election night – they only gave us the tools to save our country. We still have to save it. And we are once again facing the same political party that Lincoln once called a “disciplined, proud and pampered enemy.”
We have made a tremendous start. President Trump proved – as he put – that to secure our border we didn’t need new laws – we needed a new president. Within 30 days, he cut illegal border crossings 96 percent and stopped 99 percent of the “got aways.” The massive caravans of illegals in Mexico that were heading north on Inauguration Day broke up and dispersed.
Crossings at the dangerous Darian Gap declined 99 percent – saving thousands of innocent lives that the Democrats had encouraged to cross that deadly jungle.
The largest illegal mass migration in history now requires the largest repatriation in American history – with top priority given to the 600,000 criminal illegals in our country – many hiding under Democrats’ sanctuary laws – and the 1.4 million illegals who have had their day in court, have been ordered deported by an immigration judge, and yet who continue to thumb their noses at our laws.
Yet the Democrats are throwing every obstacle they can and have made a known MS-13 gang member into their poster child. We don’t know how many such monsters they deliberately allowed into our country, but unfortunately, we are finding out every day, tragedy by preventable tragedy.
We’re already seeing results. In the first half of this year, murder rates and fentanyl deaths have plummeted. Apparently, if you deport thousands of violent foreign murderers and drug smugglers, then you get fewer murders and drug deaths. Who would have thought it?
Our next task is to revive the American economy and repair the damage the Democrats have done to the American dream. The Big, Beautiful Bill delivers much of that revival and fulfills many of the promises we have made to the American people.
First and foremost, it stops the biggest tax increase in history from taking effect in January.
That 22 percent tax increase would raise an average family’s taxes in this district by $2,000
a year. If you are a family making just $75,000 a year, your taxes are going up $1,500 unless we can enact this bill.
The Big Beautiful Bill not only prevents this economic calamity; it gives working families and seniors additional relief – no tax on tips; no tax on overtime; and a $4,000 increase in the standard deduction for seniors to protect their social security earnings.
I’ve got news for the Democrats: “millionaires and billionaires” don’t work for tips; they don’t log overtime and they don’t rely on Social Security.
This is a quintessential middle class tax cut, yet the Democrats are doing everything they can to block this relief for working Americans.
The party that lied about Biden now is lying about this bill. Let’s just take one example, Medicaid. The Democrats’ mouthpiece in our region, the Bee, excoriated Republicans for heartlessly throwing millions of helpless Americans off of Medicaid.
Bear in mind that Medicaid was supposed to help the aged, blind and disabled, but since Obama, its rolls have swelled with able-bodied adults doubling its costs in less than 10 years, and now consumes $6,900 from an average family’s income taxes – more than the entire defense budget. That’s why the Democrats want to increase your taxes – they need the money to keep people on the dole.
This bill says that able-bodied adults can stay on Medicaid and food stamps. But we’re going to ask one thing in return. We’re going to insist that they get up off the couch and spend 20 hours a week working, or at least looking for work, or at least training for work. That’s it. They can stay on Medicaid and food stamps, but they need to do what every working family is doing every day to pay their taxes to support them. This is what the Democrats are setting their hair on fire over.
When a similar requirement was enacted during the Clinton administration, welfare rolls dropped by half as able-bodied adults went back to work, earned their way off welfare and went on to better lives. People weren’t kicked off welfare – they got off welfare because they went back to work!
That’s just one example of how outlandish and shrill the Democrats’ attacks have become. This bill provides a half-trillion dollars of savings – mainly by stopping green energy giveaways (to millionaires and billionaires). It finishes the border wall and beefs up the border patrol to protect our families from the violent criminal gangs that the Democrats lead in. It opens America’s energy resources once again.
At noon on January 20, the Democrats suddenly became deficit hawks – and I certainly welcome them to this fight. After spending and borrowing billions of dollars we didn’t have on their Green New Deal, they are suddenly aghast that the Congressional Budget Office scores the Big Beautiful Bill as adding to the deficit.
You even hear that from some attention-starved Republicans. And I agree that there are hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful subsidies, grants and congressional earmarks that remain untouched. That’s what we can get to work on.
Nor will it widen the deficit. That CBO projection is based on the same flawed model it used to predict that the first Trump tax cut would cost $1.5 trillion in revenues. Instead, growth from that tax reform grew revenues by $1.5 trillion. The CBO bases its current projection on an anemic 1.8 growth in GDP over the next decade. The postwar average growth is over three percent. And at three percent GDP growth, the deficit will shrink.
That’s how we grew out of the World War II debt – proportionally as large as our debt today.
In FY 1946, Harry Truman abolished the excess profits tax, slashed the highest income tax rate, and cut federal spending from $85 billion down to $30 billion. The Keynesians at the time predicted 25 percent unemployment and a second great depression. Instead, we got the post-war economic boom.
The Trump policies are the same policies that have consistently produced periods of dramatic economic growth under Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and yes, Bill Clinton.
We forget that after his 1992 mid-term drubbing, Bill Clinton announced that “the era of big government is over.” He approved the biggest capital gains tax cut in history, reduced federal spending by three percent of GDP, ended “welfare as we know it” and because of economic growth, produced four balanced budgets in a row.
Here’s the fine point of it: the only economic indicator that matters is how Americans answer this question next year: “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” If we can get this bill enacted by summer, it will have a full year to work, and by this time next year, Americans could be enjoying one of the most explosive periods of growth in our nation’s history and all that means: secure borders, safer communities, lower taxes, abundant energy, more and better jobs; a higher standard of living and a better quality of life – a big, beautiful future for all Americans. That’s what the Democrats fear most: happy voters.
(Congresman Tom McClintock II, a Republican, represents California’s 5th congressional district since 2009. His district includes Hughson and other parts of eastern Stanislaus County).
