The New Yorker:

The House G.O.P.’s Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill” makes a reckless three-trillion-dollar gamble with America’s creditworthiness.

By John Cassidy

As Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans were struggling to pass their budget-busting tax-and-spending bill last week—they eventually got it through by a single vote—my mind went back more than three decades to February, 1993, when, in a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton met with some of his aides to finalize an economic plan to present to Congress.

The previous November, Clinton had swept to victory on a promise to revive a sluggish economy, the effects of which had been widely blamed on the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush. During the campaign, Clinton had talked about raising spending on sectors such as education, infrastructure, and scientific research. In the February meeting, however, Clinton’s top economic advisers, including Bob Rubin, the then head of the National Economic Council, and Lloyd Bentsen, the Treasury Secretary at the time, were advocating substantial cuts in the budget. They argued that this policy would reassure investors about the budget deficit, which the government finances by issuing Treasury bonds, and encourage a rally in bond prices and a decrease in borrowing rates. (When bond prices rise, interest rates fall.) In the 1994 book “The Agenda,” Bob Woodward recounts how some of Clinton’s political operatives felt frustrated by the President’s embrace of fiscal austerity. “How many votes does the fucking bond market have?” Howard Paster, a former lobbyist for the United Auto Workers union, whom Clinton had appointed to liaise with Congress, said at one point in the discussions. “We’ve got to win votes on the Hill, not Wall Street.”

Go to link