Crapo helps explode the debt and harms everyday Idahoans | Opinion
The federal debt has reached $13 trillion.
That’s 13 with 12 zeros behind it.
If you stacked up just 1 trillion $1 bills, the stack would be 67,900 miles high. Stack all $13 trillion, and it would be … too damn tall. Irresponsibly tall.
“The country of Greece recently found out where reckless spending and fiscal irresponsibility leads — to national bankruptcy and, in this case, violent riots in the streets,” U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo warned in his clarion call.
Fifteen years ago.
In 2010.
In 2025, we’re in three times as much debt — $36 trillion, the majority of it racked up while Crapo and his party controlled government — and Idaho’s chief fiscal hawk has helped craft and ram through the Senate the One Big Beautiful Bill, which will add an estimated $4 trillion more to the debt when all is said and done.
How tall is that stack of ones?
Crapo’s prediction that Obamacare would turn us into Greece failed to materialize. So it seems Crapo decided to do his best to make it come true.
Crapo even helped change the basic rules of accounting so that he could try to claim he was cutting the deficit — a claim so absurd it demonstrates contempt for his constituents’ intelligence. If Congress did nothing, the Trump tax cuts would expire. Crapo made $3.8 trillion of the cost of extending those cuts vanish by adding them to the status-quo baseline.
Politicians lie. They tell people what they want to hear to win their votes. They attack their opponents wherever they sense a weakness. That’s all par for the course.
But rarely in political history has there been hypocrisy this naked, this bold, this utterly shameless.
Will all these tax cuts for the rich juice so much economic growth that the bill will pay for itself? Actually, nearly the opposite is expected to happen.
There are two ways the Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of a bill. One is simply to add up changes in taxes and spending. The other is to add in estimates of how it will affect economic growth — both tax cuts and spending increases tend to speed up growth, while tax increases and spending cuts tend to slow it down. This second method is called dynamic scoring, and in general, it tends to show that a policy will cost less overall than the basic budget numbers suggest.
But when the CBO scored this bill it found that the tax cuts and spending increases will add so much to the federal government’s debt that the modest improvement in economic growth — about 0.5% over the next decade — will be completely swamped by spiking inflation and interest rates.
The net result is that the bill will cost about $400 billion extra due to a worse economy, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes. It will also add more than $1 trillion in interest payments on the federal debt over the next decade.
And for all that debt, the bill will make the lives of Crapo’s average constituents worse.
Many in the Senate GOP were reluctant to push forward because it will hurt their states so badly. The bill guts Medicaid, which provides health coverage to the poor, people with disabilities, many children and the elderly, and SNAP, or food stamps, which provide basic food assistance so Americans don’t go hungry. Those cuts might kill about 93,000 Americans by 2039, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump’s alma mater.
All this so that the stockholders and CEOs in the banks and pharmaceutical companies that have filled Crapo’s campaign coffers for decades will make out like bandits, and tens of thousands of his constituents will lose their health insurance and literal food off their plates.
Last week, 18 Republican senators — more than one-third of the total — voted for an amendment to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to keep rural hospitals in their districts from going broke due to Medicaid cuts, as The Hill reported. Crapo was not among them.
Nor did he get special favor for his constituents — as other Republican senators did.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, for example, extracted concessions for her vote. Her constituents in Alaska get a special carve-out from cuts to food stamps. Crapo, who according to Politico, was seen in extended negotiations on the floor with Murkowski before she agreed to back the bill, got nothing similar for Idaho.
You should ask Crapo: If he could get a deal like that for Murkowski, how come he didn’t get one for you?
And that’s not the only way this bill is expected to harm Idahoans. When you spike the interest rate on the federal debt, that’s not something that just affects the government.
Banks use those interest rates to set the rates of car loans, mortgages, business loans and credit cards. So any major purchase you make in the next few years will be more expensive because Crapo wouldn’t raise taxes on the rich.
If local governments float bonds to pay for schools, those bonds are in direct competition with federal debt for investors’ dollars. Because Crapo wouldn’t raise taxes on the rich, the cost of those bonds will rise, as well.
Crapo has done what he set out to do: Deliver a win for Trump and his donors.
And a loss for his constituents.
Crapo should have enough respect for his voters to be honest about that.
If he’s going to make their car loans and mortgages impossible to afford, push up inflation, drown them in medical debt and take food from their kids so he can keep tax cuts for the rich, he should at least have enough respect for them not to tell them that’s rain hitting their boots — when everyone knows it’s another sort of liquid altogether.