THURSDAY: Voters hate the bill when they know what's in it!

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, 2025

Also, they don't know what's in it: The zone is flooded every day—and the day of reckoning for the budget bill continues to draw near.

As the zone keeps getting flooded, every distraction serves as a distraction. Also, every actual news event functions in much the same way.

That said, what is in that budget bill? Also, how well does the public understand what's in the ballyhooed bill?

In this morning's New York Times, Jacob Hacker and Patrick Sullivan address each of those questions. We're scoring Professor Hacker as first among equals. Here's the identity line:

Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale, is the author, with Paul Pierson, of “Let Them Eat Tweets​: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality.” Patrick Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale.

Whatever! At any rate, Hacker and Sullivan aren't fans of the bill. Headline included, here's how their guest essay starts:

How Awful Is the Republican Megabill? Here Are Four of the Worst Parts.

The Trump-era Republican Party, we’re told, is a working-class party standing up for ordinary citizens against powerful elites. One section of the Republicans’ major policy bill is even titled “Working Families Over Elites.”

But that bill—the one and only major legislative effort of Trump 2.0—is the most regressive, least populist policy package in memory. With its distinctive mix of tax cuts laser-focused on the rich and spending cuts that most hurt middle- and low-income Americans, it would shift more resources up the income ladder than any bill passed since scorekeepers started keeping track. And when voters learn what it would do—even Republican voters—they recoil from it.

We know, because we asked them. In a survey we ran after the House version of the bill passed, we showed a random selection of voters how the bill would affect the take-home income of less affluent Americans versus the top 1 percent. Opposition exploded, with only 11 percent of Americans supporting the bill—one-third the level of support seen among those not shown the distributional results. Among Republicans, the shift was even larger: Support and opposition flipped—to nearly 3 to 1 opposition from nearly 3 to 1 support.

As unpopular as the bill is, however, Americans have yet to fully understand the special alchemy of inegalitarianism that defines it. Break through the deception and misdirection, and Republicans’ signature policy bill, which President Trump and G.O.P. lawmakers call the One Big Beautiful Bill, seems more aptly named Elites Over Working Families.

The New Haven pair state two major findings:

Voters hate the bill when they know what's in it. Also, voters don't know what's in it!  

Briefly, let's state the obvious:

The validity of Hacker's findings turns on the accuracy of what he and Sullivan told their random selection of voters about the budget bill's contents. To give you a rough idea of what those voters were told, here's how today's guest essay continues along from above:

The bill is awful for most Americans in many ways. Here are four of the worst.

1. It is epically regressive

[...]

2. The hyper-regressive tax cuts you haven’t heard enough about

[...]

3. A war on the I.R.S. could make the bill even more costly.

[...]

4. It is another “skinny” attempt to repeal Obamacare.

Those are the four (4) major problems they attribute to the bill. In each case, as you can see, we've omitted their amplification of the matter in question.

Hacker and Sullivan see this bill as a disaster for middle- and low-income Americans. That said, discussion of this bill keeps getting swept aside because of the endless array of distractions which now define American political culture—but also because major orgs like the Fox News Channel will never, on pain of death, discuss provisions of the bill which may harm the bulk of their channel's viewers.

Sad! But that's the way our political / journalistic culture works in these latter days.

What's actually in the budget bill? Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt insist on joining President Trump in his angry denunciations of whatever it is the president has just angrily denounced. As such angry pseudo-discussions roll on, discussion of the budget bill gets swept to the side again.

This bill is going undiscussed in many venues and for various reasons. Meanwhile, can anyone here play this game?

We've shown you the headline which tops this guest essay online. For reasons we can't quite explain, this is the headline which appeared in this morning's print editions:

Three of the Ugliest Points About the Republican Megabill

No, we aren't making that up! According to the fine print beneath the online presentation, that's what the headline said in this morning's print editions!

Did someone have trouble counting to four? Also, as the nation continues to slide toward the sea, can anyone here play this game?