In short, Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union says Americans have dodged a bullet.
"American families certainly avoided a financial catastrophe because of the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB)," he asserts. "Otherwise, on average, each filer in the United States would have faced a tax increase of about $2,300."
Had the original tax cuts of 2017 been allowed to expire, families with many children or home-based businesses could have faced up to a $5,000 additional financial burden.
Sepp says the BBB also addresses the federal deficit, which "continues to spiral out of control, adding to the national debt in an unaffordable, unsustainable manner." Overborrowing and overspending are two sides of the same coin, and the BBB only made modest progress towards stopping that trend.
Elon Musk does not think the bill does enough to reduce some of the highest and heaviest cost drivers, like federal Medicaid spending. Sepp explains that the BBB does not make cuts in that area, but it does slow down spending through reforms like tightening eligibility requirements and stopping a "state scam" where they raise provider taxes, take the proceeds, get a federal match, and launder the money back to the very same people being taxed.
"That's an important step forward for reform, but it is only a first step," he tells AFN.
So much more needs to be done, and Congress and the president need to start that work right away.
"Their very first opportunity is the so-called rescissions package, which has to get to a vote by July 18th," Sepp relays. "What that would do is ratify $9.4 billion in additional spending reductions in a few key programs like public broadcasting and USAID going to foreign countries."
He calls that a tiny start in the big journey toward a more fiscally responsible federal budget and warns that if Congress and the president cannot take this step, then the rest of the path ahead will be "very rocky."
