Ex-Treasury secretary pans Congress for passing Trump’s ‘shameful’ megabill he says will harm economic system | EUROtoday

Donald Trump obtained his want of signing the “big, beautiful bill” into regulation on July 4, however a high economist is pouring chilly water on his celebrations.

Larry Summers, the previous Obama Treasury chief and center-left financial guru, unleashed scathing criticism of the regulation on Sunday, claiming it was going to hurt American financial development by slashing the social security internet in essentially the most unprecedented method in many years.

“The Yale Budget Lab estimates that it will kill, over 10 years, 100,000 people. That is 2,000 days of death like we’ve seen in Texas this weekend,” Summers informed ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week.

“In my 70 years, I’ve never been as embarrassed for my country on July 4th,” he added.

“These higher interest rates, these cutbacks in subsidies to electricity, these reductions in the availability of housing, the fact that hospitals are going to have to take care of these people and pass on the costs to everybody else, and that’s going to mean more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation, that’s the risk facing every middle-class family in our country because of this bill.

“And for what? A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population? Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now? I don’t think so. This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back,” Summers continued.

He additionally rejected out of hand projections from Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers, who claimed that financial development ensuing from the tax cuts and different measures within the invoice would steadiness out the invoice’s deficit spending. This proved to be a headache for conservatives who fought to make deeper spending cuts within the laws, however had been denied.

“It is, respectfully, nonsense. None of us can forecast what’s going to happen to economic growth,” mentioned Summers. “There is no economist anywhere, without a strong political agenda, who is saying that this bill is a positive for the economy. And the overwhelming view is that it is probably going to make the economy worse.”

Summers’s criticism will possible be written off by the administration as coming from a former Obama appointee, however even nonpartisan forecasters proceed to worry that any development of the U.S. economic system ensuing from tax cuts will possible be offset by the Trump administration’s tariff insurance policies, that are set to return into impact this Wednesday. A 90-day pause on the president’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs is because of finish, and the president is about to ship letters to quite a few U.S. commerce companions informing them of the brand new tariff charges.

Negotiations with the EU and varied international locations are ongoing, however officers have given no indication that one other pause is on the desk. Markets slid sharply upon the final announcement that the president could be sharply elevating tariffs.

Summers is one among many economists who has referred to as the president’s tariff technique naive.

“The question is mostly how much damage is going to be done,” he mentioned of Trump’s tariffs in April, throughout a Bloomberg interview, including that the reciprocal tariffs plan was “bizarre”.

Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, additionally trashed Trump’s megabill on Sunday throughout an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

The governor of a state with many rural areas, Beshear was a vocal opponent of the invoice’s provisions to chop Medicaid and SNAP advantages through the imposition of labor necessities, which nonpartisan analysts venture will trigger tens of millions to depart the applications as a result of points with paperwork, authorities crimson tape or confusion about reporting necessities.

On Sunday, Beshear delivered vicious criticism of Republicans in Congress who supported the laws, accusing them of believing “that poor people are stupid” because the GOP makes an attempt to disclaim that the invoice represents a lower to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers, defending the invoice’s new work necessities, have repeatedly echoed the identical depiction of a Medicaid recipient vulnerable to shedding eligibility below the brand new regulation: a younger, male twenty-something residing unemployed in a basement accumulating authorities advantages, a cartoonish stereotype Democrats say merely doesn’t exist in actual life.

“You can lie all you want about what’s in this bill. But the numbers are the numbers,” mentioned Beshear on Sunday. “These work requirements aren’t really about getting people back to work. They are about increasing the paperwork on everybody.”