The Unreported Economic Boom, and Why Elon is Wrong about the Big Beautiful Bill
Is the world's richest man wrong to demand more cuts? Heck no: federal spending is a disgrace. But his argument misses the bigger picture.
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by Rod D. Martin
June 6, 2025
The most widely predicted recession in modern history still hasn’t arrived. The markets still haven’t crashed. Growth still hasn’t collapsed: quite the opposite. Inflation is falling. And the stock market is surging.
But you wouldn’t know any of that if you listened to the Enemedia. Instead, you’d think we were days away from becoming Venezuela. And that the One Big Beautiful Bill is a “disgusting abomination,” to quote Elon.
Well. Let’s talk about that.
Trump understands the lessons learned from the 1990s budget surpluses: that growth is more important than cuts, and that Congress will occasionally vote for the first, rarely the second. His strategy is predicated on those lessons, both from his own observation and from the intimate advice of the man who made those surpluses happen, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The soaring deficit numbers depend on the Congressional Budget Office’s partisan analysis, which as always asserts that tax cuts will not create economic growth on which higher tax revenues will be collected. Yet this has always proved wrong. In fact, in the 1990s, budgets the CBO promised us would balloon the deficit actually produced budget surpluses, and briefly a paying down of the national debt.
I repeat: the CBO said this was impossible then. They’re saying it’s impossible now. And they’ve always, always been wrong.
But in fact, the economy is already growing. The One Big Beautiful Bill is designed to put that growth on steroids. It is not intended to be the last word on cuts, a key misunderstanding. But even if it turns out to be exactly that, it may not matter.
More to the point: beneath the headlines, there’s a serious, multi-pronged strategy not just to fix the deficit, but to eliminate it — and the debt as well.
Yes, really.