THE REPUBLICAN FORMULA FOR SUCCESS: GET YOURSELF BRANDED AS THE SOLUTION TO PROBLEMS YOU CREATE

The House has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, that's its official name). It will go to the Senate, and there will be changes, but it will undoubtedly remain awful.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would drastically cut federal spending on programs for the bottom 10% of Americans, while increasing federal benefits for the top 10%, all while exploding the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion....

The CBO also stated that the bill would trigger $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act.

Polls routinely show that voters worry about government deficits and debt. We're told that the Republican Party is full of deficit hawks, but nearly all the so-called hawks in the House voted for this, even though they know the bill is a budget-buster:

Figures from the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan referee, forecast that the GOP tax bill would push deficits to around 7% of gross domestic product in the coming years, an unprecedented amount of borrowing for a peacetime economy with a low unemployment rate.

Financial markets are sending up big screaming warnings about this:

Yields on government debt spiked on Wednesday as investors fretted that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the federal debt pile over the next decade. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which underpins mortgages and commercial loans, has risen nearly a percentage point since September, even as the Fed cut its benchmark lending rate by almost the same amount over that period.

The yield on the 10-year on Thursday stood at 4.61 percent, well above the “yippy” level it traded at last month that forced Trump into a tariffs rethink, and a 90-day pause on some of the biggest levies.

Investors appeared to tank an auction for 20-year Treasury bonds on Wednesday.

And that's going to affect ordinary people soon:

Higher bond yields mean the government has to pay more money to cover the interest on nearly $29 trillion in debt, raising the prospect that Americans will someday have to pay more in taxes or accept cuts in government services.

As long as Republicans are in power, "cuts in government services" will always be the preferred choice.

Consciously or unconsciously, the Republicans know that they're increasing government deficits and debt, not reducing them. They always do this -- and it works. Why? Because even though they routinely push America further and further into debt, they're perceived as the party that opposes debt. They sustain the problem so they can look like the heroes riding to the rescue to solve it.

This is similar to what the president did with tariffs, although we all saw it happening: Trump created an economic crisis, the markets freaked, then he (partially) cleaned up the mess he made -- and his poll numbers rebounded. He has an unearned reputation as an excellent dealmaker, so even though we've lost more than we've gained from his tariff dealmaking, half the country thinks he's our hard-nosed economic savior.

Republicans regularly benefit from unearned reputations for "touughness." Remember when George W. Bush was asleep at the switch in the weeks before 9/11, then became an almost universally admired president in its aftermath? That's because we all "know" that Republicans are strong on defense -- even though Bush was the exact opposite.

How do we turn this around? I don't know. It's hard to kill a myth.