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注册特朗普的归来，这是一份新闻通讯，其中包括第二任特朗普总统职位的报道。
In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After that, things go as you might expect.
参议院共和党人毫不犹豫地制定了一项赤字爆炸的税收，以至于他们几乎不了解，参议院共和党人呼吁人们在女高音中的一个场景。一群年轻的有抱负的黑帮决定坚持黑手党纸牌游戏，希望能获得流氓的尊重并被带入船员。在最后一刻，这些家伙简要考虑了，然后他们中的一个人提出了决定性的论点，以促进诉讼：“让我们在曲柄磨损之前就这样做。”之后，事情会按照您的期望进行。
Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors’ sanity. As of today’s 50–50 Senate vote, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie, the House and Senate have passed their own versions of the bill. The final details still have to be negotiated, but the foundational elements are clear enough. Congress is about to impose immense harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.
像黑手党的想法一样，国会共和党人已经介绍了一个如此令人难以理解的计划，以至于描述它是为了质疑其作者的理智。截至今天的50-50票参议院投票，副总统J. D. Vance打破了平局，众议院和参议院通过了自己的法案版本。最终细节仍然必须进行协商，但基础元素已经足够清楚。国会即将对数千万美国人构成巨大伤害 - 剥夺他们的健康保险，降低福利，提高能源成本等等，以使少数其他美国人最不需要帮助的美国人受益。该法案几乎旨在引起政治反弹。
Given that President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in The Sopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: Why are they doing this?
鉴于唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）总统和共和党（GOP）与女高音的白痴不同，并没有集体在水晶甲基的影响下，所以自然而然地出现了问题：他们为什么这样做？
Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.
从历史上看，共和党人一直犹豫要通过抵消削减政府支出来支付减税费用。在短期内，这在政治上是理性的。与从共和党减税中受益的富裕美国人相比，政府计划的减少影响了一群选民。为了避免这种反对，国会共和党人通常会通过增加借贷而不是减少支出来为税收法案提供资金。目标是将成本推迟到遥远的未来。
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.
《一项大型法案法》采用了这项技术，增加了约3万亿美元的国家债务。但是，由于减税成本是如此巨大，而且预算赤字已经如此大，所以共和党人这次无法将全部成本放在信用卡上。取而代之的是，他们计划通过削减预算来支付一部分费用。这将使他们面临以前从未经历过的一种反击。
Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.
民意调查表明，大型巨型人数约为水下20分，这反映了以下事实：其基本轮廓（削减税收减少与医疗补助支出减少）的事实，暴力是公众的道德直觉。无论许多选民都反对该立法，一旦生效，他们将更加讨厌它。
Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” he explained.
共和党人大部分以愉快的演讲来消除这种残酷的现实。在曲柄疲倦之前，在一次精心策划的集会上，以推动法案，特朗普试图向选民不介意的紧张立法者放心。他解释说：“我们在这项法案中削减了1.7万亿美元，您不会感觉到任何东西。”
Trump was nodding at the claim that cuts to health-care subsidies and food assistance would be limited to fraudulent beneficiaries and other waste. Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.
特朗普对削减医疗保健补贴的声称表示点头，而粮食援助仅限于欺诈性的受益人和其他废物。这不仅是无处不在的，而且还没有可以想象的世界是真实的。即使价值1.7万亿美元的福利确实会给无证的移民或欺诈者提供，但削减仍然会影响给他们照顾的医生和医院，卖给他们食物的农民和杂货店，等等。
Jonathan Chait: The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid
乔纳森·查特
In reality, the megabill will take food assistance away from some 3 million Americans, while causing 12 million to lose their health insurance. That is how you save money: by taking benefits away from people. Congress is not finding magical efficiencies. To the contrary, the bill introduces inefficiencies by design. The main way it will throw people off their health insurance is by requiring Medicaid recipients to show proof of employment. States that have tried this have found the paperwork so onerous that most people who lose their insurance are actually Medicaid-eligible but unable to navigate the endless bureaucratic hassle. The end result will be to punish not only the millions of Americans who lose Medicaid but also the millions more who will pay an infuriating time tax by undergoing periodic miniature IRS audits merely to maintain access to basic medical care.
实际上，Megabill将从约300万美国人那里获得粮食援助，同时导致1200万失去健康保险。这就是您省钱的方式：通过将收益从人身上夺走。国会没有发现神奇的效率。相反，该法案通过设计引入效率低下。它将使人们摆脱健康保险的主要方式是要求医疗补助接收者展示就业证明。尝试过这一点的州发现文书工作如此繁重，以至于大多数失去保险的人实际上符合医疗补助资格，但无法应对无休止的官僚麻烦。最终结果将是不仅要惩罚数百万失去医疗补助的美国人，而且还要惩罚数百万，他们将通过定期进行微型IRS审计仅仅以维持基本医疗服务的机会来缴纳令人发指的时间税。
Another source of cost savings in the megabill involves killing tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy. Because renewables supply some 90 percent of new energy capacity in the United States, and because electricity demand is rising dramatically, these components of the bill will raise household costs, with the highest spikes hitting Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina, which have huge wind and solar resources.
大型巨型节省成本的另一个来源涉及杀死可再生能源的税收抵免和补贴。由于可再生能源在美国提供了约90％的新能源容量，并且由于电力需求正在急剧上升，因此该法案的这些组成部分将提高家庭成本，最高的尖峰击中了德克萨斯州，俄克拉荷马州，堪萨斯州，密苏里州，肯塔基州，肯塔基州和南卡罗来纳州，这些峰值拥有巨大的风和太阳能资源。
Perhaps the most severe political risk of the megabill is the potential for setting off a debt crisis. Rising deficits can cause interest rates to rise, which forces the government to borrow more money to pay the interest on its debt, which in turn puts even more upward pressure on rates, in a potentially disastrous spiral. This prospect is far from certain, but should it come to pass, it would dwarf the other harms of the bill.
大型巨型政治风险也许是引发债务危机的潜力。赤字上升会导致利率上升，这迫使政府借更多的钱来支付其债务的利息，这反过来又在潜在的灾难性的螺旋上给利率带来了更大的向上压力。这个前景远非确定，但是如果它已经过去，它将使该法案的其他危害相形见war。
You’d think sheer venal self-interest, if nothing else, would cause members of the Republican majority to hesitate before wreaking havoc on multiple economic sectors. Yet none of these outcomes has given them pause.
您可能会认为，纯粹的自我利益，即使没有其他利益会导致共和党成员在对多个经济部门造成严重破坏之前犹豫不决。然而，这些结果都没有让他们停下来。
One explanation is that they don’t understand just how unpopular the bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly cheered the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding members from exposure to concerns. Even the White House seems unaware of what exactly it’s pressuring Congress to do. Yesterday, when a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the megabill’s proposed tax on wind and solar energy, she appeared totally unfamiliar with the measure and punted the question. (The tax provision was later removed.)
一个解释是，他们不了解该法案生效时的不受欢迎。许多共和党人依靠党派统一的媒体来获取新闻，这些消息来源大多为该法案加油，而无视其弊端。国会的两个议会都经过了最少的审查，将法案赶到了法案，从而使成员免于接触担忧。即使是白宫，也似乎没有意识到国会要做什么。昨天，当一名记者向新闻秘书卡罗琳·莱维特（Karoline Leavitt）询问大型风能和太阳能征税时，她似乎完全不熟悉这一措施，并提出了这个问题。（后来删除了税收。）
When the Affordable Care Act passed, 15 years ago, Republicans protested that the law had been rushed through Congress. That was not true: The ACA was painstakingly shaped over the course of a year. But the attack seems to have revealed a belief among Republicans that speed and secrecy are political advantages that a shrewd party would employ. They have utilized this method to stampede members of Congress into enacting sweeping social change with minimal contemplation.
15年前，《平价医疗法案》通过时，共和党人抗议该法律已通过国会赶走。事实并非如此：ACA在一年的过程中艰难地形状。但是这次袭击似乎揭示了共和党人的信念，即速度和保密是一个精明的政党将采取的政治优势。他们利用这种方法来踩踏国会议员，以最少的沉思来实施彻底的社会变革。
The second explanation is that Republicans in Congress, or at least some of them, do understand the consequences of their actions, and are willing to accept the political risk because they truly believe in what they’re doing. Republicans have, after all, spent decades fighting to reduce the progressivity of the tax code and to block the expansion of guaranteed health care for people unable to purchase it on their own.
第二个解释是，国会中的共和党人，或至少其中一些人会理解其行动的后果，并愿意接受政治风险，因为他们真正相信自己在做什么。毕竟，共和党人花了数十年的时间来努力减少税法的渐进性，并阻止无法自行购买的人们的保证医疗保健。
The third explanation is that the political logic of doing the president’s bidding has created an unstoppable momentum. Trump has been flexible on the specifics of the legislation. (He floated slightly raising the top tax rate on the rich, to disarm a Democratic attack on it, only for Republicans in Congress to shoot him down.) His sine qua non for the bill is that it be big and beautiful. Using Trumpian lingo to label the bill was a clever decision to brand it as a Trump bill rather than to identify the measure by its much less popular contents.
第三个解释是，进行总统竞标的政治逻辑创造了不可阻挡的势头。特朗普在立法的细节上很灵活。（他略微提高了富人的最高税率，以对国会的共和党人击倒他的民主袭击，以解除民主袭击。使用特朗普语言标记该法案是一个聪明的决定，将其标记为特朗普法案，而不是通过其不太受欢迎的内容来确定该措施。
Annie Lowrey: A big, bad, very ugly bill
安妮·洛瑞（Annie Lowrey）：一个大，糟糕，非常丑陋的比尔
Trump has accordingly treated internal dissent ruthlessly. When Elon Musk denounced the bill for blowing up the debt and cutting energy technology, Trump threatened to cut Musk’s federal subsidies (subsidies that, curiously enough, he had no previous objection to maintaining). When Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina criticized the bill’s Medicaid cuts, Trump threatened to back a primary challenger in next year’s midterms. Tillis immediately announced that he will not seek reelection.
因此，特朗普无情地对待内部异议。当埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）谴责该法案炸毁债务并削减能源技术时，特朗普威胁要削减马斯克的联邦补贴（奇怪的是，他以前没有反对维护）。当北卡罗来纳州的参议员汤姆·蒂利斯（Thom Tillis）批评该法案的医疗补助削减时，特朗普威胁要在明年的中期支持一个主要的挑战者。蒂利斯立即宣布他不会寻求连任。
Republicans in Congress have grumbled, occasionally trying to exert leverage to force policy changes. But, with rare exceptions, they have never entertained the prospect of actually opposing Trump’s big, beautiful bill. Their criticism begins from the premise that its passage is necessary. They keep repeating the phrase “Failure is not an option,” a mantra that seems designed to prevent them from considering the possibility that passing the bill could be worse than the alternative. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing Medicaid cuts, then fell in line. “This has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid,” he told NBC News, referring to an effort that he then personally participated in by voting in favor of the bill.
国会的共和党人抱怨，偶尔试图发挥杠杆作用来迫使政策变化。但是，除了极少数例外，他们从未娱乐过实际反对特朗普大而美丽的账单的前景。他们的批评始于前提，即它的通过是必要的。他们不断地重复“失败是一种选择”一词，这似乎是一种旨在阻止他们考虑通过账单比替代方案更糟糕的可能性的咒语。参议员乔什·霍利（Josh Hawley）撰写了纽约时报的反对医疗补助削减，然后排队。他对NBC新闻说：“这是国会在国会中的一个不愉快的一集，这是削减医疗补助的努力。”他指的是他亲自通过投票参加该法案而亲自参加的努力。
Or perhaps Republicans in Washington have simply grown inured to Trump-era warnings of catastrophe, which have blared for a decade on end, with accelerating frequency during the second Trump term. Trump has gone to war with the global economy, unilaterally slashed huge swaths of the government, threatened to imprison his enemies, and so on, and yet these affronts never quite bring the widespread devastation—and public revolt—that Trump’s critics warn of. One gets the sense that elected Republicans have stopped listening.
或者，华盛顿的共和党人也只是越来越多地涉及到特朗普时代的灾难警告，灾难已经持续了十年，在第二个特朗普期间的频率加速了。特朗普已经与全球经济交战，单方面削减了政府的巨大片段，威胁要监禁他的敌人，等等，但这些叛逃从来没有使特朗普的批评人士警告过广泛的破坏和公共起义。人们感觉到当选的共和党人停止倾听。
They have picked a bad time to let their guard down, however, because this bill is different. One way is that legislation, unlike executive action, is not subject to the TACO principle; once a law has been passed, Trump can’t just quietly back down. The other is that they will all have cast a vote for it. An angry public won’t merely blame Trump. The ignominy for the disaster will fall upon its authors.
他们选择了一个糟糕的时间来放下警卫，因为这项法案不同。一种方法是，与执行行动不同，立法不受玉米饼原则的约束；一旦通过法律，特朗普就不能安静地退缩。另一个是他们都会对此进行投票。愤怒的公众不仅会责怪特朗普。灾难的无知将落在其作者身上。
