Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: Trump Shivs GOP Congress, Refuses to Sign Bipartisan Housing Bill | Receipts Live

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Catherine Rampell is joined by special guests from Yale's Budget Lab, Natasha Sarin and Martha Gimbel, to break down Trump's refusal to sign a housing bill he once championed, the bipartisan push for tax breaks for seniors, and what happens when the across-the-board 10% tariffs Trump imposed expire later this month.

Hey, everyone. I'm Catherine Rampel here with The Bullwork for your weekly receipts live fix. JVL is off this week, so I have the delightful pleasure of welcoming in two of my friends, Martha Gimbel and Natasha Serrin, who are joining me today. They are both affiliated with the Yale Budget Lab. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but Martha is officially the executive director and Natasha's president, is that right? Feel free to correct me if that's wrong. Yeah. They are also fellow theater nerds, econ nerds. We actually have like a whole group chat going, which I hope they don't, I hope I don't embarrass you guys in mentioning, but the Sutton Foster fan club in which, because, you know, all of the like econ theater nerds find each other and we spend like half of it, I would say, talking, trash talking econ, bad econ policies and like maybe half of it talking about. Sondheim or whatever. Lately, it's been a lot more platinum stuff, which maybe, we may or may not want to get into today. Like to transition back to the Sutton Foster of it.

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see how uncensored we get today. This is their first time. So go easy on on our friends here. But both of them are economists and yeah, excuse me, at Natasha also teaches at Yale Law School. So I place, her feet the responsibility of educating the future economic policymakers of America because somehow they've all gone to Yale law school, which is maybe something else we can talk about or not talk about. I don't know if you guys are going to want to get into that. Shit talking your university. In any event, we are going to chat today first about the housing bill and Donald Trump's

decision to basically shiv his fellow Republicans by not signing it. Is this bipartisan housing bill? And we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff. some affordability stuff, some affordability sloppulism, I guess I would say, and how that feeds into some of these debates over the future of the Democratic Party. There's obviously some overlap there, K-shaped economy, Trump tariffs, all sorts of good stuff. But why don't we start out with just telling our audience what's going on today? So Trump this morning tweeted, and I think we have this tweet.

A post confirming he is not going to sign the Road to Housing Act, the housing bill, which has been, which has passed both chambers of commerce, Congress, right? Chamber of Commerce. Both chambers of Congress. And with with pretty strong bipartisan votes. So clear the House 358 to 32 and the Senate 85 to 5. Lots of support there could have been an easy win, I think, for Republicans. and Donald Trump has gotten in the way. But maybe it'll become law anyway, if he doesn't formally veto it. Natasha, I'm just curious if you have thoughts on, like, how big of a deal this is if this bill becomes law. I think it's going to at 1159 if he doesn't sign, if that's how I should read this tweet. And I kind of think it's a wild stance for the administration to take. because remember that like Trump was elected on this.

I'm going to lower prices on day one. I'm going to deal with affordability concerns. Everything he's done since coming into office this second term, be it the tariffs, be it the conflict in Iran, is all moving in the opposite direction on affordability? You're in a place where you're raising gas prices. You're raising the prices of basically all goods that we import and even the ones that we produce domestically through these tariffs.

And this housing bill is not perfect. And we can talk a little bit about it. But like it is something that you could point at that is in the direction of trying to deal with the problem that is very real with respect to housing costs and the share of the household budget that they're eating up. And so like I do not quite understand why this wasn't like an obvious chance to have a signing ceremony and celebrate the fact that you are doing something on the single issue that is most front of mind for the American people. Yeah. I don't know. Martha, do you have thoughts on what may have motivated this? Is it just like he's thrown a tantrum?

I don't know. Maybe he thinks it's bad economics. I don't know. He doesn't say anything about the economics of it. He just seems very focused on the Save Act. I mean, I think it's interesting because it is a bipartisan bill that now, despite having passed with bipartisan support, Democrats get to go out there and be like, hey, this is this amazing bill that then the president tried to support.

But you're sort of handing the advantage of a bipartisan bill over to the Democrats in a way that I'm not a politician. No one has ever sent me to talk to voters in Ohio. That would be a bad idea. But it's very confusing to me. Yeah. I mean, there are pieces of it that are kind of weird, right? So there's like a bunch of the focus in the bill is on the idea that we're not going to have private equity firms by single family homes, which is like less than one percent of the market. and has literally nothing to do with housing affordability.

But I don't think there is like grand new. I don't think that is the argument for why, oh, they think that that is like overstated as a focus of the bill. And so that's why they're not supporting it. I think it's a version of what you're describing, which is. No, it's actually the opposite, right? Like Donald Trump wanted stricter limits on the institutional investors. And I think what was it? The Senate version.

I'm trying to remember which version of the bill was. There was one version of this bill. There was the Senate. Yeah. The Senate version of the bill. had these measures in it that would basically force owners of a lot of single-family homes that were meant as rental housing stock to sell it, right? Like they had to sell it to their owners within seven years or something like that. And there was some concern about whether that, it seemed like

that was already stopping developers from continuing on projects that were already in progress. So if anything, it seemed like he wanted more constraints on institutional investors, which that name institutional investors has always kind of, I know it sounds big and scary, like oligarchs, but it's like there are landlords who own a lot of homes. And they're not that many of them. We're going to get some hate for talking about this, I'm sure. But there's this interesting thing, right, where we say that there's something different about rentals that are apartments, but as opposed to rentals that are houses.

which I mean, sort of gets at this broader thing about housing in general, which is just that it's such an emotional thing for people, right? It is both most people's largest investment and the place where they, you know, live, want to raise kids. And so, you know, the fact that housing affordability has legitimately gotten really, really bad, I think is driving a lot of the dynamics that we're seeing, you know, both in the economy and also politically, which gets back to, why wouldn't you want to be able to talk about this bill? Yeah. I don't know. Well, I have one other reason why Donald Trump might not want to talk about this bill. Who was it?

It was Punchbowl. I think we have a clip from this. Had reported a few months ago that Trump told Speaker Johnson in a private conversation that no one gives a leap about housing, which is just, do you know, know that a quarter of renters in the United States spend more than 50% of their income on housing costs. So like that is just like it, you know, we are where we are. That is like an incredibly out of touch statement and an incredibly out of touch view. And reflects, I think, a lack of laser focus on the cost of living issues that are animating our policy discourse. Well, I would also say

it's a bit ironic given where Donald Trump's wealth originates that like, his father made it big developing a lot of housing clearly like even if he doesn't personally feel the burden of high housing costs like you would think he gives a bleep about housing because like his his family fortune depended on it and he understands that it means a lot of things to a lot of people I don't know I mean like there are a bunch of ways to read this is totally tone deaf and bizarre. There are also some, like, parts of, and here's, I'm really going to sound like an economist, like parts of the consumption bundle that people really care about relative to others. And even if they're, you know, less expensive, people care, like housing, child care. Those are very

emotional purchases for people. My mother spent a smaller percentage of her income on housing and child care than I spend on housing and child care. She still really cared about where we lived. and she cared about the child. It is just an emotional purchase for people, whether it's renting or owning. Yeah. It's very good. Yeah.

I mean, and the other question is, so I think my view on this housing bill is that it's kind of more a symbolic victory. Like it's useful as messaging rather than like actually dealing a lot with affordability, at least in the near term, right? Because like the things that are in the bill, we talked about the institutional investor piece of this, which I think,

think is more symbolic than anything else. It allows developers to skip environmental reviews. If a house is going up between two buildings that were already reviewed, it allows pre-approved housing designs that would need fewer approvals before construction happens. It makes it a little easier to build manufactured homes. So those things are helpful, but like the biggest blocks for more housing construction, as I understand it, are at the state and local level. Totally. And, yeah. It's funny. Catherine, since we're doing the Budget Lab, Bullwork takeover, like, Martha and I've actually been talking a lot of questions. Because we're trying to think about the ways in which we can usefully analyze housing policy and what levers the federal government has versus state and local governments. And the reality is on the supply side, the constraints are really coming on this state and local level. And so there are things that can be done. And some of them are in this bill with respect to how we, you know, have competitive. or can Congress pass law? Ed Glazer has said versions of this. Congress should pass a law that

says that in certain counties in the country where housing costs are especially expensive, you should be in a place where you're forced to build X number of new homes every year. The constitutionality of those questions is up for debate. But like those policies may be, but really the bulk of the stuff, like the abundance conversation is really about what's happening at the state and local level. And there's a lot of opposition at this. It's, It's not just that, like, there's inertia. I feel like there is active opposition from nimbist groups and others. And, you know, part of the, I think part of the abundance conversation is about, like,

how do you keep people from the small population of people who, like, want to abuse things like environmental law and environmental review, which actually are grounded in public welfare type arguments. Like, how do you keep that from being abused by a few people who want to just, like, hoard all the housing to themselves? And it's really difficult because you'll have, like, people at the local county commissioner meeting who are very invested, the existing owners, right,

who are very invested in stopping more construction because they don't want more people to move in, They don't want more congestion. They don't, you know, they don't want their nest egg to get less valuable, which is what may happen if housing prices fall. Like, they're winners and losers from all of that. But it's really hard to deal with the political economy there. I think housing is also like a perfect example of something that, you know, the econ policy walks find really frustrating, which is the things that we think will work to solve this, right? Like building more supply will not work tomorrow, right?

Like even if everyone just kind of like, it's still going to take years, right? Because you can't build houses immediately. And that's really hard. Whereas, you know, other policies that I think make economists much itchier, like freezing the rent, rent control, you know, have this kind of immediate effect for people. But, you know, are very worrisome about like the long run implications for housing affordability and building out more houses. Yeah, so this is a perfect transition because I wanted to talk about like why we are seeing the rise of those kinds of promises to the public about rent control freezes or other measures that just do feel like a quick fix literally will stop rents from rising if you freeze rents, but make economists, I would say make them uncomfortable, but that's like two feelings. Grounded, right? It's like it will hurt that housing. Actually raise the cost.

Right. Yes. Yeah. Do the opposite of what you want. It's counterintuitive and it's just like an easier fix to kind of say we're not going to let prices go up. And there's been a lot of that. There's been a lot of discussion again at the state and local level about things like

this. But also at the federal level, I know that, um, uh, The candidate who just beat SBIAT in the primary here in New York, Valdez, she has pitched a nationwide rent control freeze. I actually, I don't understand the legality of that. I don't know. Maybe it's possible. Maybe it's not.

I just don't know. Natasha, you're the lawyer. Natasha's a lawyer as well as an accountant. Overachiever. But anyway, so, like, there is some desire to do this at the national level. And I guess the question is, like, there's a lot of this, what I would derisively refer to as sloppulism going around. And I think that's really part of the civil war that's happening, as I said, within the Democratic Party also is happening in the

Republican Party. I think in the Republican Party, that kind of won over a while ago. And now Democrats are going through the same, I don't know, the same gantlet. So it's not just rent control, It's also things like freezing property taxes. Actually, let's play something from the debate. Was it this week? I think it was this week. Yeah, for Michigan Democratic Senate candidates. I think we need to be freezing property tax for seniors.

If you paid off your home at some point, we can't expect you to keep up with property taxes that are going up. Now, how do we pay for that? Well, again, if we tax billionaires their wealth, if we were to invest in the Department of Education so that we're paying centrally for public schools in an equitable way. There are a lot of opportunities for us to lift the burden off of seniors who've done their job. They've worked extra hard.

They deserve a dignified retirement. And we've got to be thinking about how to offer them that. So that's Abdul Al-Sayed. He's running for Senate from Michigan. And he's positioned as, you know, the more left-wing populist candidate. But it's not just people from that position. I think we have some headlines from a bunch of, developments over the past month or so where.

Ipartisan consensus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you've got Pennsylvania, Boston, is that state level in it? Yeah, state level of Indiana, Ohio, all passing property tax relief for seniors. I mean, I've also seen people comment that like, you know, how is socialism going to work if we repeal all of the taxes? But what do you think of this proposal? Martha, do you have thoughts on? So first of all, I'll just start off by saying that I find it wildly offensive,

that at a time when we are apparently moving towards no one paying taxes, they keep setting this up in a way that means that I will still be paying taxes. It's going to be like the three of us are the last ones paying taxes in the United States. So. Tax break for musical theater nerds. Right, exactly. If you buy a ticket to like Sutton Foster, you don't have to pay income taxes that year. I mean, first of all, we can get into a whole thing about the fact that property taxes are local. Like as a senator, this is not a thing he would be addressing.

That's also true, yes. You know, sure, fine. Why not? Let's all have fun here. But like why seniors? I'm like so annoyed about this. I can't even like fully form a sentence. Like,

we already spend really a lot of money on seniors in the United States. We spend about six times as much on people over 65 as we do on people under 18, which is just at the federal level, which is just kind of crazy when you think about like what should society be investing in, you know, where does future tax revenue come from, et cetera. like, I mean, we all have children not to be like overly dark about this, but the future tax revenue is coming from our children. And we should probably be investing in them so that they will be providing more tax revenue so that then our lives will be even better. And also because investing in the children is good.

And so it's like this like totally bizarre like theory of where the government should be spending money. And like it's just kind of crazy because the thing, I just don't understand the, argument for it, not just generationally, obviously, because this is like a tax break for for older people relative to the investments we need to make in the young, but also because, like, this is a tax break for the wealthiest cohort. Like, and we are a country that is having a debate that I think is an important one about the idea that maybe we should have wealth taxes or we should have mark-to-market taxation of capital gains because we're worried about too much wealth having accumulated at the top of the distribution. These are these people. And so the

idea that you're going to say that on the one hand, we actually need to do more with respect to inequality and we need to do more with respect to doing a better job of collecting taxes on the wealth that's accumulated in the hands of the very fortunate. And on the flip side, you're saying, actually, no one pays taxes. It just, it's not really an intellectually consistent argument. And the sort of fiction that it feels like some policymakers are telling themselves is there is enough wealth with Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg and like 100 people like them to fund everything that we want to do. And I'm here to just tell you that that's not the case. And we should tax those people much more aggressively, certainly. But like, there comes a time where we have to reckon with the fact that to build the type of society we want,

we need to raise substantially more revenue and not be like 31 out of 38 OECD countries in terms of tax collections. Yeah. The way I always think of it as is if you, want like a Scandinavian-style welfare state, which I think is what a lot of Democrats want right now, whether it's through Medicare for All or free child care or lots of other things, some version of which I support, I certainly support universal health care and access to more affordable child care and things like that. But those things are expensive. And you kind of can't have the benefit without having the way to tax for it. And anyway, I'm I know we only have a bit of time left.

Oh, people are mad in the comments about describing all seniors as wealthy. I don't think that's what not all seniors are wealthy, but generationally, they are the wealthiest of the living generations. It's a life cycle thing as the economist. It's a life cycle thing. This is why you're economists. I'm not political strategists. That's right again. No one's sending us to all credit.

Yeah. Okay. We got lots of other stuff we could talk about. including there's the free buses thing that has, speaking of sloppulism, free buses that have become now faster buses in New York. I think we have a headline on that. But this is another one of these like promising free things. But I think what's interesting about this is that as I understand that there's some friction with the unions about making buses faster because maybe that will hurt overtime, maybe that will otherwise affect the number of hours that are needed from

the unionized workforce. And one thing that I think is kind of interesting that's been lost in this discussion about like the establishment versus the anti-establishment in the fight within the Democratic Party is that like the candidates who are painted as establishment are often the candidates whom the unions officially support. And there's going to be more friction, I think, going forward. Like, Espiat was supported by the unions, as I recall. Again, he lost. But, you know, how do Democrats deal with, it's easy to, like, paint the establishment as like the oligarchs or whatever, which is not really true. But, like, the entrenched political interests, or at least the historically aligned political interests for the Democratic Party are often groups that, you know,

people are sympathetic to, much more sympathy, certainly more sympathetic to organized labor. than to oligarchs. I don't know. Do you have thoughts or forecasts about how Democrats can navigate these competing interests from different parts of their constituencies? I mean, I think the biggest thing for so much of this, right, is like there is no free lunch. Like, everyone wants the cool policy that will cause no problems and no one's going to lose out. And there's, like, this is the problem, right? one person's waste, fraud, and abuse is another person's paycheck. This comes up a lot in the context of healthcare. Healthcare, exactly.

Should we reform how we do Medicare? And it's very easy for us to be like, oh, we could think about these ways that, you know, we deal with payments, et cetera. But, you know, that money is going to people. And I think people like to tell themselves that it's going to, you know, ex-villain caricature here. But a lot of it is going to constituencies that people like, doctors and nurses, people who are looking after our kids, et cetera. And so I think one of the things in particular that happens when you start getting into a, what I refer to is a tighter fiscal situation, which is where we are right now.

Natasha's laughing. And I'm just like the nurse. Again, budget lab bowl or takeover. Tighter physical situation. Tire fiscal situation. We are spending slightly too much money relative to the revenue that we're taking in. You have to make hard choices. And everyone wants to think that there's some magical, you know,

get out of jail free card where you aren't going to have to do that. And, like, that is part of the problem. And I think one of the things that you're seeing from voters is, you know, things feel so unfair, things feel so uncertain. It feels like this should be. able to be fixed without affecting you or your neighbor or your kid's teacher. And it, you know, some of us are just going to have to figure out what it is that we're really willing to pay for and what it is really worth it to us. And that is going to be a really difficult conversation.

And there's no magic wand, at least that I'm aware of, that gets us out of that. I have a magic wand. Ooh. Tariffs, right? Oh, yeah. There we go. Donald Trump. says that we can just use tariffs to pay for everything we can use it to replace the income tax. I think of the other direction, which is I have a magic wand to deal with the affordability issues, which is get rid of the tariffs. So there's, right. Well, anyway, this was just my way of trying to transition at the very end to what's

going on with tariffs. Natasha, I think you and I have talked a little bit about this, but like the tariffs that Donald Trump put in place after the Supreme Court knocked down his. is national emergency tariffs. I think that time, that, that, like, ticking clock is about to, that alarm clock is about to go off pretty soon at the end of the month, July 24th or something, and those tariffs are going to expire. Again, I, you know, I jokingly said that, like, the tariffs are going to pay for everything. Donald Trump often says this all the time. They, they are raising lots of revenue, or they have raised a lot of revenue. But what do you think

happens when they expire? And, like, what's the, can you give us sort of a, overview of what the economic consequences have been to date of this whole rigmarole. Yeah, it's really interesting. My colleagues and our colleagues at Budget Lab have spent a ton of time analyzing every twist and turn of the tariff saga. And we're still at tariff rates currently with these extended, what section 122 is what we're deploying to be able to levy the tariffs at the moment. and we're at a place where we're at the highest tariff rate since 1940,

that costs the American people, something like $1,100 a year in higher prices, it is a drag on economic growth, all the things. But what's also important and is related to like what's going to happen at the end of the month is it's not just that the tariffs are high. It is also that the tariff level and the rates that are being applied are so uncertain, right? And so one speculation is like maybe what they're going to do is they're going to say, we're going to just do another round of Section 122 tariffs and kind of tweak them slightly, but deploy essentially the same authorities to essentially have the same across-the-board tariffs.

And like maybe that's what they're going to do, or maybe they're going to levy different trade authorities, or maybe they're going to get rid of the tariffs wholesale, like, who's to say? And that makes it really challenging from the perspective of being able to, like, if you're a business that's trying to import, think about like under what trade environment are you going to be doing that? if you're a country that's trying to negotiate with us, like, what are the terms and what are the legal limits? These are all, like, fully open questions. Yeah.

And the idea that he can just, like, restart the clock every 150 days, I feel like there was a debate about this with war powers, military strikes as well. I don't remember if that was legally resolved. Maybe somebody, I don't know if either of you know or if somebody in the comments knows, but somebody will probably email me after this. But yeah, I assume that there's some legal question there. Like there wouldn't be a 150 day limit. Because you're supposed to go back to Congress. Yeah, after 150 days, you're supposed to go get congressional authority to do this. And so like, why can you just keep rolling it over indefinitely if that's the strategy they try to pursue?

I'm sure there are going to be legal challenges no matter what happens. And there already are that are working their way through the courts. But as we all know, the courts move slowly. And so it's going to be many versions of challenges. before this is ultimately resolved. Yeah, Martha, do you have thoughts on the macro stuff or anything else? I mean, I think the other thing here, right, is if companies don't know what's going to happen with tariffs, it's not like they're going to cut prices.

They're going to keep things higher. Any refunds are going to go to the companies because they're largely the ones who've paid for them. And so, you know, bringing it back to this question of affordability, you're continuing to stick consumers with these, you know, tariffed goods. prices, and why should companies rate lower prices anytime soon when they have no idea what environment they're going to be operating in? Yeah. Yeah, certainly not good for affordability, not good for economic growth, not good for hiring, I would guess, right? Like, if you're a company

and you can't plan, you don't know what your costs are going to be, how are you going to invest and hire and all of the above? All right. I think we are about hitting our time. But thanks guys so much for chatting today. Didn't even make you say all of your impolitic thoughts about Grand Platner and whatnot, but maybe next time. Next time, actually, I want to get Martha's rant on the K-shaped economy, which we did not get to today. So many. So many. So many.

So many. So many. So many. But thanks so much for joining me, Natasha. Martha, and thanks everyone for tuning in. We will be back next week with another receipts live and hope you have a great weekend.