Tea at Trianon: Truth About OBBB

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Truth About OBBB

From Tierney's Real News:

I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit. This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.
Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars. This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t “fund” almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not).
In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill “added” trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. (Read more.)