WEDNESDAY: The analysts screamed and tore their hair...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2025

...when Staphanie Ruhle got it wrong: Last night, at the start of her program's second segment, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle decided to level with her viewers. She went on to describe the fiscal nightmare which would be created by passage of the GOP megabill.

She started the segment with a reference to the name of a regular segment:

RUHLE (7/1/25): It is time now for "Money Power Politics." And this evening, we are talking about our financial responsibility as a country.

I want a "level set" here. This has been a problem for the United States for many years. Our debt has exploded over the past two decades under the leadership of both parties. But that makes it even more important to take a hard look at what this Republican bill would do to make an already bad situation even worse.

As the New York Times puts it, this is one of the most expensive pieces of legislation in years and would put our country on a more perilous fiscal path.

Ruhle wasn't kidding around! Bringing the note of sadness in, Paul Krugman recently said that current projections describe a situation which is "unsustainable" even before the GOP bill makes future debt larger still.

Krugman has recently said it; for that reason, we believe it. Now, Ruhle was going to "level set" the situation. She was going to lay it right on the line.

At that point, sad! Moments later, she offered this thoroughly bungled statistical portrait of where matters stand:

RUHLE: These numbers are going to impact all of our lives in really important ways. So I want you to keep these three things in mind.

First, the national debt. Right now, it's a whopping $37 trillion. And this bill would add at least three trillion more over the next decade.

The analysts screamed and ran into the yard. Glumly, we slumped back into our beanbag chair.

Sad! Ruhle was right about the size of the national debt at present. But her presentation plainly gave the impression that the GOP bill would cause the debt to ruse to $40 trillion, perhaps a bit more, by the end of the next ten years.

Plainly, her presentation gave that impression. Plainly, that portrait is howlingly wrong.

Sadly, this is the actual state of current projections:

According to current projections, the debt will rise to something like $56 trillion (or more?) over the course of the next decade even if the GOP megabill doesn't pass. According to the CBO, the GOP bill would add something like an additional $3-5 trillion to that current projection:

That is, the debt will stand at something like $60 trillion over the next decade if the megabill passes. We're at $37 trillion now, but we're headed for much bigger things.

As we've noted again and again, our major journos have largely been fumbling this matter all through the past few months. Now, MSNBC's top economics / business anchor has completely misstated this matter

None of this actually matters, of course. It's much too late to expect anything like a competent national discourse, about this or anything else.

That said, the analysts screamed and tore their hair when Ruhle histrionically laid out the facts. The pictures she painted was groaningly wrong.

Again and again, in a million ways, this is the state of Blue leadership.

As an example of what we mean: Once again, here's Andrew Duehren's picture of the situation:

Senate Bill Would Add at Least $3.3 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says

[...]

With roughly $29 trillion in debt currently held by the public, the budget office had already expected the government to borrow another $21 trillion over the next decade, meaning the Republican bill would make an already-dire fiscal forecast worse. And the initial estimate of a cost of $3.3 trillion for the Senate bill is an undercount, because it does not include additional borrowing costs which could push the bill’s overall addition to the debt closer to $4 trillion.

For a larger excerpt, see Monday afternoon's report.

Bowing to the endless complexity which dooms all hope of understanding, Duehren is referring to debt "held by the public," a subset of overall national debt. But as you can see, total debt is projected to grow by a mammoth amount even if the GOP megabill doesn't pass.

The megabill would add a few trillion more. Pretty soon, before you know it, you're talking about real money!