Budget update: Shhh! Turn up the heat quietly this time!

The Senate and the House are in agreement-ish on a budget. This time, cuts are steeper, spending higher, and deficits bigger, but Congress believes they can wear us down slowly this summer.

See our previous posts for much more background depth:

• February 28: Crystal ball read of the minute: Medicaid and Medicare budget cuts

• March 3: Medicaid (and Medicare?) on hot seat this week

• March 9: No shutdown: Republicans kick the can on cutting Medicaid for now, and Dems go along

Previous episode summary

The Senate and the nation reacted poorly to the House’s March 2025 budget proposal, which pretty openly targeted cutting 11% of Medicaid benefits and (also openly) noted the $4+ trillion cost of extending Trump’s tax cut.¹ So Congress called a pause and kicked the can down the road until forced to deal with it by Sept 30 of this year. And they got smarter: this time they’ll wear us down about cooking the Medicaid frog more carefully and quietly.

A ‘perception’ problem Congress is facing is that we now know for sure that half of the prior Trump tax cut benefits went to the top 5% of US income earners. If extended, using 2025 population and incomes, that means 17 million Americans (top 5% income bracket) who make at least $350K in 2025 will again get 45% of the benefit of the cuts. The other 323 million Americans would split the other half, well-buried data that ,any of the 323 million are slowly coming to understand. (See details in prior posts.) This is all good old-fashioned politics: get those who haven’t to underwrite tax cuts for those who do.

Where we are now, and why it matters to women