Understanding the Big Beautiful Bill’s Repercussions, with the Highest Ranking Woman in Congress

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Amid the heat of recent legislative chaos, I got the opportunity to briefly sit down with the House Democratic Whip, Representative Katherine Clark, to ask what your average American can anticipate over the coming years—from the downstream effects of Medicaid cuts on rural and low-income communities, to the fourfold expansion of the ICE budget.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Congressional Budget Office’s estimate

• CRFB analysis on OBBBA

• Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (CBPP)

• What is the Alternative Minimum Tax? (Schwab)

• Understanding the “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” deductions (NPR)

• “My Brain Finally Broke” from Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)

Transcript

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

The impact of this is going to be generational and you cannot close—we have 300 hospitals that are saying they will close under these Medicaid cuts alone. Once those hospitals close, you cannot just come back five years from now, 10 years from now, and say, we’re going to reopen. Communities fail, people move out, people move on.

And what we’re saying to people reliant on healthcare, especially in rural America, is you don’t matter. You don’t matter. We’re going to do something to your community that could change the very fabric of it for a long, long time for this sort of sugar rush for the very wealthy to get a tax break. And so it’s shortsighted and just these long term impacts that really concern me.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Today’s regularly scheduled programming was going to be a conversation with the author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder, my friend Nick Maggiulli. We talked about how we earn, invest and prioritize in different phases of our financial lives. It’s a pretty tactical conversation. I’m excited for you to hear it…next week.

But this week, given the massive legislation that passed the week our Ray Dalio interview aired where he raised the alarm bells about the downstream deficit effects if it were signed into law, it only felt right to have a conversation that dealt more directly with what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will likely mean for average Americans.

At the end of last week’s Rich Girl Roundup, we read an email from a listener named Brian who wrote, “I believe the logical second and third order effects of the Medicaid and Medicare cuts in this bill need to be prosecuted and explained to your audience. Even if it can’t be stopped, it needs to be understood. Wwhen our leaders make big changes to millions of Americans’ financial lives explaining the impact of those changes to folks who do not have the time to connect the dots is nothing short of a public service,” and that is exactly what we are going to do today with a somewhat unexpected guest.

So around the same time that we’ve received Brian’s message and I was thinking about the best way to approach this, a last minute opportunity came up for me to talk with the highest ranking woman in Congress, House of Representatives Minority Whip Katherine Clark about the legislation. Congresswoman Clark is in her seventh term as the US representative for Massachusetts’s fifth Congressional District, and it was a shorter and less formal sit down I usually conduct for this show because it came together so quickly and she was kind of in the thick of all that law making. So you’ll hear me working through some things in real time with her.

Before we get into it, I want to lay out a few of my thoughts on this legislation that feel critical to just bear in mind as we talk about this. So the Congressional Budget Office’s dynamic estimate, which is the most generous version of a budget projection for legislation because it offsets the costs with the anticipated economic growth, expects the legislation to add conservatively $2.8 trillion to the federal deficit by 2034. And that’s the thing. While some modest growth is anticipated from extending existing tax law, every credible independent analysis warns that growth will be dwarfed by the costs of borrowing to make up for all the lost revenue.

So to say that this legislation is designed to disproportionately benefit the Americans who need at least is a pretty substantial understatement. To quickly understand why, you have to consider its most expensive components. So the largest expense is the approximately $2.2 trillion that’s allocated to extend the tax brackets introduced in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Now of that $2.2 trillion, $1.1 trillion, so like half of it, is just the cost for the 1% of Americans who earn more than $500,000 per year.  More money will flow to the 1.2 million Americans who earn $1 million or more per year than the bottom 127 million Americans combined. Those who earn a hundred thousand dollars or less extending the repeal of the alternative minimum tax, which is something that was established in 1969 to target a small number of very wealthy taxpayers who avoided paying their share by exploiting tax loopholes. That’s another huge expense estimated at over $1 trillion in lost revenue. Again, that primarily benefits those who are earning more than $500,000 per year. So the biggest components, if we’re looking at this as if it’s like a household budget, the biggest components, the most expensive parts are primarily intended to benefit the highest earners.

And unlike these changes which are permanent, the majority of the more targeted relief measures expire after 2028. As a result, they make up a relatively paltry portion of the overall legislation. So here I’m talking about the widely publicized and celebrated “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime.” Bear in mind, this is only the first $25,000 of tips and the first $12,500 of overtime that are deductible for certain occupations as long as you earn less than $150,000 per year. Now together these two measures cost $164 billion. So for context, remember at least 15 times as much money is allocated to households earning more than $500,000 in just the two permanent tax cuts I described a little bit earlier.

So this promised soundbite of “no tax on social security,” that’s another pretty glaring example of this. It was diluted to a relatively, I will just say, inconsequential $6,000 bonus deduction for retirees over 65, which like the other two measures will expire after just three years.

So Representative Clark and I spent the majority of our time talking about the anticipated economic effects of cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and the expanded ICE budget. But I wanted to lay out those components first because I think it emphasizes something critically important about how we conceptualize and talk about this legislation. Much of the discourse around this bill has rightly emphasized all the ways in which poor working class and rural Americans have been sold out.

And I shared an analogy the other week in the newsletter that we often talk about this as though the country is an airplane where the first-class cabin keeps siphoning all the snacks and the square footage from the basic economy or the coach cabin. But I think the reality is actually worse. It’s more like we’ve spent the last few decades in an accelerating auction that has now turned into selling off things like the fuel and the engine fan blades and the pilots to subsidize incrementally nicer seats and tastier meals for the 12 people in first class. Sure, those passengers might be slightly better off for a little while, but that trade-off is going to look pretty freaking stupid when you sell off one too many parts of the plane and the whole thing goes down. That’s how this feels to me. It feels like a major “congratulations, you played yourselves mistake.” And I fear that we are rapidly running out of things to plunder.

As you’ll hear at the end, I did express some frustration with Representative Clark about the ease with which this has been pushed through, that our representative democracy doesn’t feel as though it is representing us right now. I don’t think I am alone in my disappointment in the Democratic party and it does leave me feeling a little cynical about advice to do things like get out and vote or call your congress person. But nihilism can be a very effective strategy too. And as Jia Tolentino put it recently in the New Yorker, “I sense the logic of the abused at work within me. What’s the point of screaming when we are going to be locked in the house with them for however many years.”

Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York City revived my faith in electoral politics, if for no other reason than because: his campaign proved that a bunch of billionaires and real estate firms and private equity firms, they can throw tens of millions of dollars at an election and they still can’t overcome a strong door knocking campaign that speaks to the affordability challenges of regular people.

But that is just one small win in a sea of what feels like relentless Ls and it is going to be an uphill battle. And at this point, I’m not sure that looking to elected representatives for answers is…well, the answer. And I realize that’s a bit of a strange transition for a conversation with an elected official. But the next several years especially are going to require us to ask more of ourselves and one another directly to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to support your neighbor, to invest in community, the very same stuff that we talked about with Jonathan Grimm two weeks ago. Now with that said, here is a legislative explainer with Representative Katherine Clark right after a quick break.

Katherine, thank you so much for joining me. I know that you are very busy right now, so I really appreciate you sitting down to talk through some of my burning questions about this legislation.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

Well Katie, I am so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Absolutely. So this is a personal finance show, so I do want to start with talking about what is going to happen to the average American families budget now that this bill has been signed into law. Because as I’m just looking through the numbers, and there are many different versions of these numbers. There was the original, you have the house version, you have the Senate version, you have what actually passed.

And it was looking to me as though the average family is probably going to get, give or take, $83 per month in extra money. The top 1% is going to take home about $165 per day. So you keep me honest here. And then the final thing is just that anyone who earns less than $50,000 per year is more likely to see a program that they use get cut than see any incremental savings. Is that more or less a fair representation of the outcomes that we’re looking at here?

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

That’s exactly right. As we are looking at this bill and trying to explain it, and I do agree with those who call it the “big bill” because it’s huge, but it certainly isn’t beautiful for average families. And what I mean by that is that in this bill it is $114 billion in massive tax cuts for the richest 1%. And if that wasn’t unfair enough, really under this bill, you have to make over $500,000 in income to even really get anything that is worthwhile and anywhere near permanent tax relief.

And what it further does is drive up costs for everyone else because this is offset by cuts to Medicaid, primarily a trillion dollars out of Medicaid, over $200 billion out of food programs. Those are the two major areas, but it’s going to increase co-pays for every single one of your listeners because we know that when people don’t have preventative healthcare, and if you take the most conservative estimate of how many people will lose healthcare, it’s about 12 million. I think the actual number is closer to 17 million when you add in the cuts to the ACA. But when 12 million people lose their healthcare, they show up in our ERs, they show up sicker and those costs are passed on to everybody. So everyone is going to see increase in copays, in healthcare premiums, missed or delayed doctor’s visits.

And that also is going to mean shuttered hospitals and nursing homes. Nursing homes are predicting that a quarter of all nursing homes will close because of the impact of Medicaid from this bill. And when you close a hospital, you’re also often closing the largest employer in a region. And so all of this is going to compound. Not only are you not getting the tax breaks unless you’re already doing very, very well, but it is going to continue to drive up costs when, at this point, we know that 60%, that’s most of all American households are struggling to get by with the basics. And so we’re sending to 60% of the households we’re going to send you in the wrong direction in order to provide these massive tax breaks for the very wealthiest.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It all strikes me as extraordinarily shortsighted. It’s interesting, I saw a map of the US the other day that showed change over time in the largest employers in every state and the majority of the map, something like over 30 states, the top employer, the biggest industry was healthcare.

So it’s interesting to point out the loss of, as you said, a quarter of all nursing homes will close. We’re talking about rural hospitals in particular. I’ve seen a lot of talk about people being very nervous about hospital closures and this trickle-down effect of that leading to unemployment. So I think what we’re highlighting here is really just the second and third order effects of you might hear Medicaid being cut and go, oh, well I got Aetna babe, that’s all right. I’m not worried about it, but this is still going to impact communities way beyond people who are on Medicaid.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

That’s right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So let’s take a step back for a second. How does the Medicaid program work? Who primarily benefits from Medicaid?

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

40% of Medicaid recipients are kids. It covers almost 50% of all births in this country. So certainly pregnant moms benefit and the rest are primarily seniors and people with disabilities. And one of the things that we are seeing my colleagues across the aisle trying to make this idea of this is all just getting people who aren’t working, who are sitting around playing video games in their mom’s basement, collecting your public dollars.

And we know that’s not true, and we know that this system of adding all this red tape so that people who are eligible for Medicaid end up kind of just quitting because it is so hard and so time consuming to work through this red tape, meet the requirements even though you’re eligible for the benefits. And we have the proof points because both Georgia and Arkansas tried this and they abandoned the programs. It has been done and tried and by two states that are pretty conservative with their public benefit packages In Georgia, there were 250,000 rurally eligible Georgians, but only 12,000 were able to work through that kind of red tape. And now we’re taking this failure of policy and making it nationwide.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And we know that the way you get those cost savings, there’s this weird rhetorical trick happening here where it’s like, oh, we’re not taking away healthcare, we’re not cutting healthcare. We are just making sure that people who are going to get that healthcare are working.

But the only way you get a trillion dollars of savings is if you are taking the healthcare away. It is care that has to go in order to save that money. And my understanding of this is that the estimate of those savings far exceeds the number of people who would no longer meet those new eligibility requirements.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

That’s exactly right. And when we’re looking at a trillion dollars in cuts just in the Medicaid program under this bill, only about a third of that is actually savings from this increased red tape, this so-called work requirement. The rest of it’s a pure-out cut. So even if you buy it, you still have about $700 billion that is just a cut to benefits.

And remind your listeners, that it was just a few months ago that the House Republicans were saying doesn’t say Medicaid in this bill. Look at the bill, it doesn’t say Medicaid, but you knew from where they were trying to cut at that time, $800 billion. There was only one account it could be from.

The dishonesty with the American people about what this bill does. And you said something so interesting about this being shortsighted and it is shortsighted, but what really worries me is that the impact of this is going to be generational and you cannot close. We have 300 hospitals that are saying they will close under these Medicaid cuts alone. Once those hospitals close, you cannot just come back five years from now, 10 years from now and say, we’re going to reopen, community fail, people move out, people move on. And what we’re saying to people reliant on healthcare, especially in rural America, is you don’t matter. You don’t matter. We’re going to do something to your community that could change the very fabric of it for a long, long time for this sort of sugar rush for the very wealthy to get a tax break. And so it’s both shortsighted and just these long term impacts that really concern me.

And we are already seeing some hospitals that are saying looking ahead, because we all know people, they’re not going to wait until the worst thing happens. Nursing homes will close, hospitals will close because they know that revenue stream is not going to be there. And so I think one of the things besides consumer confidence is CFO confidence, which is so low and that is going to apply to healthcare systems and impact decisions well before the major pieces of this bill get implemented.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Just for a moment, as a little thought exercise here, if you were playing devil’s advocate for the other side, what is the strategy? To me, it kind of seems like it’s straightforwardly bad economic policy. And so if I’m sitting and I’m trying to steelman the other side and I go, alright guys, no, but taking healthcare and food away from people is actually going to create a big economic boom and this is really smart because X, Y, Z. I’m just curious from the purview that you have and the conversations that you are having in Congress, is there a recognition that this is bad or have some of these people kind of bought into their own propaganda?

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

I think in some ways they’ve bought their own propaganda, but in other ways we have people who are making a pure political calculation. We have 16 members of the House Republican caucus who wrote a letter just a few weeks ago and said, these Medicaid cuts are unsustainable. Look what’s going to happen in my community. My community is very reliant on Medicaid, just the whole gamut of these impacts. And then they turn around and vote yes for a second time.

So I think for some of them, they’re just bought in, but some of them this is very much a political calculation. Do I step out of line with my party and with the president who’s in my party, who I do not want to bring his raft down on my campaign or my career…or do I do what’s best for the people at home? It’s just very hard to pull those things together.

And I have to say that people run for Congress, and I think this is true across parties, they run to help people, but sometimes political ties fund you and we’re in one, but when you are voting against the interests of the communities that you serve willingly, this isn’t untried, we just did this in 2017, we know it doesn’t work and we’ll do it again because you are fearful of the president or a primary, it’s time to leave Congress. I understand that evaluation, but then it’s time to go because this bill just sort of exemplifies the very worst of the partisan divide that we’re in and that people who know better and are public and write down that they know better are still voting for it out of fear.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We will continue this conversation after a quick break.

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who works for a major corporation. She is very high up in their corporate communications and she let me know, she calls me and she’s like, Katie, I’m very disturbed. One of the leaders of this company who I guess has final say over the big communications decisions brought to the team, this idea of like, Hey, we need to post on Instagram. We need to thank Donald Trump by name for this tax cut, essentially saying we need to kiss the ring for our own good, for our own protection.

And she said, Katie, fascism is not coming. Fascism is here. When you have major corporations feel like they have to play ball, they have to bend the knee, they have to kiss the ring to stay in the good graces of an extremely powerful state, the transition is complete.

And I think that this is the exact same phenomenon that we’re talking about here where if you’re coming out and you’re saying, this is bad for my constituents, and then you go and you vote for it anyway because there is so much fear of how that power is going to be wielded against you If you don’t, that’s not representative democracy. I do feel like we are in a new era of American politics and that things have become extreme to a point that I had never expected to see in my lifetime.

And that brings me to a question which is the quadrupling of the ICE budget because the size, the sheer magnitude of this budget indicates to me a much, much broader intention for how this use of force is going to be deployed. We’re already beginning to see this. There are simply not enough undocumented people in this country to necessitate that big of a budget and that much power and money being allocated to this group.

Beyond that, if we’re looking at this purely through an economic framework, we know that undocumented people are huge net contributors in our economy. They create wealth and they fund benefits programs that they themselves do not benefit from. So from where you are sitting, does the administration genuinely not understand that or is there something else going on here?

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

Yeah, well I think what we have is a president and an administration who is using our immigration system as a cudgel. This is the ultimate political wedge issue. And what’s happened under this bill is that we have handed ICE the biggest budget of any law enforcement agency and federal government. Just think about that with all the things we want our federal law enforcement to do. It is ICE that is, now has the most funding of all of those law enforcement agencies and it really does feel like this is becoming a police force, a law enforcement that is really owes its allegiance to the president. That’s pretty terrifying.

And on the other hand, I think everybody agreed with the plan as set forth. If you took Donald Trump at his word when you ran and said, listen, I’m going to deport people who have committed violent acts here, who’s against that? But that’s not what we’re doing anymore. We are now rounding up even American citizens and deporting them with their parents, American children, one of whom was in cancer treatment.

And this idea that somehow not only if you take all the humanity out of it, that it doesn’t have a real economic impact and it has again become one of these issues that we saw during the campaign. When we were able to get a bipartisan agreement back at the end of 2023 in the Senate, Donald Trump was very clear. He said, I don’t want it. I want this as a political issue. And so what we’re doing is creating this divide with immigrants are vilified and we’re no longer going after just the lawbreakers. We are just deporting people without due process. We’re rounding up students who are here legally because we don’t like an op-ed.

In my district, there was a young woman who was here on a Fulbright scholarship who co-authored op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper and she was detained for weeks for nothing. There’s nothing this woman who’s here studying the effects on trauma on young children is threatening to our country and she would not ever overstay with her visa. She’s here completely legally, disappeared off the streets of Massachusetts. That should be chilling to everybody.

And what will rule is an immigration system that works. We all want security at the border. We want to increase technology so we can stop the flow of fentanyl and other drugs and weapons systems. We’ll want to make sure that people come in in an orderly way. But we have to do that not by just increasing the ICE budget. We need to look at our asylum system and how we fund it.

And one of the examples that I always turn to was above what we had that Democrats passed that was killed by Republicans in the Senate and it was the Farm Workers Modernization Act and it said, let’s look, we know that a huge percentage of our farm workers are undocumented workers and let’s get a bill together, which not only had the buy-in of farm workers unions demanding conditions for them that are humane with heat breaks and proper housing, but also the buy-in of huge corporate agriculture because they understand that if this was a way to protect and have surety around this workforce that is good for their bottom line and it’s good for consumers to keep our grocery costs low. So this bill was exactly what we should be working on. How do we get people out of the shadows, get them documented, but also have that workforce that we need? And we passed it in the house with a Democratic majority and it was failed because in our movement to help the system was seen as a political liability and we have to break out of that and make sure that we are creating a system where people safely can come to this country.

So there’s so much work that we could be doing, but the party has chosen to go this other route where we vilify and dehumanize all immigrants at a time where we know we are very reliant on immigrant work to help make our economy run and grow and to keep costs lower.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I care a lot about labor rights and the conditions that lead to labor exploitation. It’s a lens that I look at a lot of economic theory through. And so I am fully empathetic to the argument that is made that if somebody is undocumented, they’re going to be far more open to being exploited, therefore more likely to be exploited. That’s why they contribute so much to our economy because they are capturing so little of the value that they are creating.

But I think what you’re highlighting here is really, really important, that when we talk about spending money on something like this, that we could and should be spending it on just fixing the immigration system rather than arming a secret police force who’s going to disappear people off the streets with little to no accountability. And I think it’s really interesting because I do feel like a lot of the argument that’s being made often relies on gesturing at criminal activity.

But we know that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. Statistically they commit fewer crimes. So I even think that that can be a red herring. So it’s interesting too because even as we’re sitting here and I’m double checking my assumption of like, this is true, right? Let me go make sure this statistic is correct. I go to type it in and I’m like, okay, yes, undocumented crime versus natively born crime. What are the numbers here? And the first result is a National Institute of Justice paper from a government website that was cached in Google, like an older version of the page was saved. And so you can still see the preview, but when you click on the link and you go to see the result for undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, there’s a warning on the page. It’s been taken down and there’s a little warning that says, oh, the DOJ is currently reviewing materials in accordance with recent executive orders, and pages and publications are going to be taken down because of that.

So I’m like, oh my god, even in this exact moment, what a perfect example of revisionist history that the facts don’t matter anymore. There is an official narrative that power is committed to, and when you have a state that has this much power, they can enforce it. They can literally revise the facts. So it’s a really scary time.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

It’s a really scary time and I think it is hard to take in, I know I struggle with it and I’m living in this political world every single day, but it’s really hard sometimes to take in that we are being peddled some pretty outrageous lies.

And one example from this bill is that the Social Security Administration sent out a notice to millions of people saying after this bill, social security is no longer taxed. That just isn’t true. It’s not true. There is a tax benefit for seniors in this bill. It’s kind of complicated how you qualify for it. And of course it ends in four years unlike the permanent parts, but it will get you through the next presidential election. And that is the goal. But it does not do away with taxes and social security and the idea that the administration is sort of encouraging their agencies to promote absolute lies.

There’s half a trillion-dollar cut to Medicare in this bill because of formulas, the incredible debt that it runs up triggers. They’re still saying there are no cuts to Medicare, to Social Security, or Medicaid. And I think what we’re seeing with this bill is that as we continue to explain what it really does, the American people are going to understand that they got the short end of the stick and that this is further rigging a system that already doesn’t work for most people against them taking away that opportunity, not even letting people get to that first run of the American dream and offer what. We’re not deciding we need to invest in a massive cancer cure or address a pandemic or revolutionize our energy so that we can avert climate disaster. It’s all to give tax breaks to those who don’t need it and won’t notice it.

And that is such a fundamental betrayal that it is so important that we connect the dots for people who are busy and maybe tuned out from politics that seems like a bunch of people arguing all the time and they feel cynical and not seen, and frankly they’re having a hard time making ends meet. And so we’ve got to continue to tell the American people what this world does and how badly it rigs the system against them.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

At the same time, I have this feeling of like, well, what can awareness really do at this point? It’s law. They have made it the law. They have stress tested and flexed their power and pushed and pushed and pushed. And again, their executive power at every turn feels like they’re just racking up Ws. So I think my big takeaway for listeners and what I talk about a lot is the power of acting at the community or the local level, staying as involved as you can, as active as you can in your local community. Because at this point, frankly, I am personally feeling extremely discouraged by the ease with which it seems as though Donald Trump has run roughshod over our legal system and our elected representatives have just kind of fallen in line. And so I’m a little bit at a loss honestly, I don’t know what we do about that.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

I think that you’ve nailed it. You’ve nailed it. We all have to do everything we can in our spheres, whether that’s our families, our people we work with, people we go worship with, people we see at the dog park, it was still the number one trusted source of information and facts, which misinformation plays a huge role in all of this. Our people that you know as family members.

And we cannot take that power for granted or say, well, it doesn’t compete against Fox News and CNN. It does. It does. And that local connection, talking to people, making sure that people have the facts that they’re seeing politics and hearing about things from someone they trust may not be particularly partisan, but they trust that they want the same good things for their neighbors and communities. That is where the answer lies.

So you may feel overwhelmed because this is completely overwhelming. Our system, our constitution, the way we have set up our federal government is built on the fact that as a president of the United States, you follow the law, you follow the constitution. And now we have exactly what the founders set this framework up for is someone who does not feel that the law applies to them.

And I do think that elections matter and local elections matter. The midterms are two years off, but there are going to be a lot of local elections in between then. And it matters that people mobilize and engage because we do, even though it doesn’t feel like it. We do have the power, we do have the power in a democracy, but it is tied to our willingness to get out there and vote and to encourage good people to run for your local school board and your local city council, making sure that you know your state reps and state senators, that all of these races really matter.

And how we have a framework to push back and contain this and get back to the work of what representative government should be. That we come from different ideologies, different life path, different parts of the country, and we come together and compromise and do good things. And this born it all down approach is not how we create in a economy that works for people in this country and we have to get back to it.

And so if I could say one thing to you and to your listeners, it’s know the power of your voice. Just know that it makes such a profound difference. And when this all feels too much, one of our new freshmen members said, you’ve got to think about it like birds flowing formation like you are on a mission to build something good for our country to make an economy where everyone can be successful, which is the work you do, Katie, all the time, but sometimes you’re tired. So we’re in this formation. Then you drop back and you’re flying in the back, rested in Europe for it, you come back. But we keep going and that’s what people have to do. We have to keep mobilizing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It’s also important to remember that there’s an element of this strategy, which is to delay all the unpopular cuts until after the midterms with the anticipation and the expectation that, alright, well we’ll delay all the unpopular stuff that’s going to hurt until we get elected again. And then the Medicaid cuts, the snap cuts, all of that’s going to hit and it’ll be fine. We’ll already have been reelected. That is clearly intentional.

And I think that if we can all clearly see that that is the strategy that politically that is the plan, that in itself is a really important thing to educate around that. A lot of this, you’re not going to feel the until after 2027. And that’s by design. Don’t let them fool you into voting for them again after they just sold you and your community down the river for political points.

So thank you Congresswoman for joining me today. I really appreciate you spending some time with us and good luck.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

Well, good luck to all of us. But Katie, thank you for having me on. We need to talk about this bill and what it means. And like you said, if you have a bill that you are proud of and you are sure it’s going to do great things for the economy, you don’t do it in the dark of night, you don’t do it in a solely partisan manner and you don’t set up timeframes. So all the bad things are permanent and the things that are good for typical working people expire right after the next major elections. That is the big tell right there. But some of this unfortunately is going to hit sooner.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s a great note. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Next week, as promised, we are back with Nick Maggiulli, who also was one of the first guests that we ever had on The Money with Katie Show back in 2021. So if you’ve been hungry for some tactical tips, baby, I’m serving them up. They’re coming.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew Content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.