The MeidasTouch Podcast - Former OMB Advisor Michael Linden on Disaster Budget Bill

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on MAGA Mike Johnson’s budget bill getting ripped up by Republicans in the Senate and Meiselas interviews former OMB Staffer and Current Director of Families over Billionaire’s Michael Linden about his views on the budget bill. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. Remember when Donald Trump and Maga Mike Johnson would say, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime? Well, total BS. Now that the disastrous budget bill, and we know how bad it is, has made its way through the Senate Finance Committee,

well, let's just say it looks very, very different, whether they're directly screwing Magomite Johnson, or this was all part of the fraud to begin with. Well, there's nothing at all in this new version, at least in the Senate, about no tax on Social Security. Remember, no tax on tips and no tax on overtime. Well, those are so extremely curtailed with all of these exceptions as they're not really anything that Donald Trump or Magna Mike ever said was going to exist. So just more defrauding of the American

people. I also want to talk just how this disastrous budget bill is hurting the economy more broadly. But of course, as you know, it's a direct attack on health care. The more than 15 million Americans could be losing their health care. It's an attack on Medicaid, on SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on housing. Just even watch how Fox is describing the changes from the Senate Finance Committee to what MAGA Mike and the MAGA Republicans in the House claim existed. Here, play this clip. The House's massive tax and spending bill

fresh off the printer. That was Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Republican, telling Fox Business this morning, the President's big beautiful bill will barely scratch the surface when it comes to shrinking the annual deficit because the slices in spending are minuscule compared to the huge mountain of debt the country owes as he sees it. Not only does the Senate want to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, the other key

changes in this version versus the House include Medicaid cuts from 6% to 3.5% by 2031. The SALT deduction cap has been extended back down to $10,000 versus the House's proposal, which raises it to $40,000. A two-year phase-out of clean energy credits versus the House repealing tax credit projects that don't begin within 60 days, and raising the child tax credit to $2,200 through the 2028 tax year versus the House, raising it to a maximum of $2,500. The GOP senators joining Rand Paul in his disdain of the bill include Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, although for different reasons. You know who also seems to have gotten

utterly screwed by the Senate? Those New York Congress members like Mike Lawler, who said that the SALT cap would have to be raised to $40,000. And now under the Senate version, it's back down to 10, and now they're basically saying, what are you going to do, Lawler? You're going to vote against it. You can vote against it.

I mean, they just keep exposing that guy all the time. And you want to hear how they're basically framing the issue of whether or not you're going to lose your Medicaid or not. Basically, I just remember back in the days where they would talk about like the Republicans with like death panels and they would say that These panels would decide who lives and who dies they're basically doing versions of that except now it's a reality TV version You have dr. Oz and he basically says that you need to demonstrate to me You want to help this country and if I think you're not helping the country you lose your Medicaid here

Listen to him in his own words. Here, play the clip. Demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater by at least trying to fill some of the jobs that we have open. And by doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid. You earn the right to live, or I decide if you die.

I mean, that's, let's bring in Michael Linden. Michael, formerly at the Office of Management and Budget, Senior Advisor. You now are the Director of an organization. Families over billionaires. This bill, disastrous as it is in the House, seems even more disastrous now that the Senate Finance Committee has put out its high level points.

What do you make of it all? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we should step back here for a minute and just remind ourselves what we're talking about here. So the House bill was very bad. The Senate bill would be even worse. But at the core of this bill is a couple of really important things for people to understand.

First of all, massive cuts to healthcare. You heard Dr. Oz talk about, he calls it healthcare reform. That's an interesting way to describe kicking 16 million people off of their health insurance. And that's what these plans would do. You have massive cuts to nutrition assistance, mainly food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Three million people are gonna lose their food assistance. We're not talking about generous benefits as it is. These are people who, you know, make do with basically $6 a day in food assistance. And then what happens to that money? That's about a trillion dollars in cuts over the next 10 years. What happens to that money?

Well, it goes to partially pay for giant tax cuts, most of which go to people at the very, very top. That's the basic math of this bill. People lose healthcare, pay more for healthcare, lose food assistance, pay more for food, pay more for energy, all so that people at the very top can get another tax cut. The Senate bill does not fix any of those things. It makes it worse. Their cuts to Medicaid are deeper and more painful than the House version. Their tax cuts for rich people are bigger

and more ridiculous, frankly, than the House version. So if anybody was hoping that the Senate would moderate the incredibly extreme House version, they were really mistaken. They were really mistaken. You know, Michael, I remember they used to, the MAGA Republicans in the early, before they were MAGA and they were whatever,

they were Tea Party or before they were the Delta. They were trickled down. They at least tried to pitch it of like, if you help the billionaires and basically give welfare for the billionaires, they're gonna be so gracious with their purchases of G6 jets and yachts and mansions that eventually you'll get a little bit trickled down on you.

They're not even necessarily even going with that hook anymore. They kind of leave it with, you're gonna help the billionaires and you're gonna like it and shut the F up. Just shut the hell up and just be quiet. They deserve it, you don't. Like that's kind of where we're at now.

Yeah, it is kind of, I mean, they know, they actually know that the American people don't buy trickle down at all. They've tried it, they've tried that argument, they've tried it so many times. They tried it under George W. Bush, they tried it under Trump the first time. And it never works, it never works economically.

That's really important. And you know, most Americans understand that in their bones that when you give a tax break to people at the top, it does not cascade down to everybody else. It just makes the rich richer at everybody else's expense. And this time you're so right. The policy hasn't changed. They are still bestowing huge tax cuts

on the largest corporations in America, the richest people in the planet, but they're not even arguing that that's gonna do any good. Right, they are, because they know that argument doesn't work. So they're just trying to pretend that that's not happening and instead say, you know, we have so much waste and fraud or abuse in these programs, it's amazing. They don't even argue that these people need

these tax cuts anymore because they know that is an argument that completely falls on deaf ears. So instead, they're just trying to distract and say, no, no, no, we're not cutting taxes for them. We're cutting taxes for you. But as you pointed out at the very front, all the tax cuts that they say are for middle income people

or working people are either absent from the bill or dramatically paired back from what was promised. Can you imagine if Donald Trump had ran on no tax on tips but only for a few years and only a certain amount of tips and only in a particular set of industries? Like that's not a particularly compelling slogan, but that's what the policy is. And on the other hand, the tax cuts for the super wealthy are incredibly generous. And you know, nobody has to jump through hoops to get their billionaire tax break. But if you're a working person, you've got to prove that you deserve it. In the words of Dr. Oz.

And then the very just nature of tips versus creating an overall economic system where Americans could be able to afford their homes if they worked a job without having to worry about will I get to how about if your company and your boss provides you with the wages and a crazy radical concept I must be a crazy left is here that you get paid wages for working a job that allows you to live a life of dignity in the wealthiest country in the world. And here's here's the thing and I don't think this is a radical concept. And push back on me if you think I'm wrong here. You know how the way you deal

with this all, you tax rich people a little bit more. Or first you start off with making sure rich people are taxed fairly, and they're not dodging their taxes, and they pay their accurate taxes that they owed. And then, you know what you say? Well, under this budget bill, someone who makes over $4.2 million gets an extra $400,000 bonus while someone making under 50,000 loses $1,000.

Maybe if we just looked at that and go, you know what? The people making over $4.2 million, you know, that $400,000, is that gonna be life or death for that person? Or will taking the $1,000 away for the person making under $50,000, by the way, not only impact and harm that person, but then result in systemic problems that are also going to hurt the person making more than $4.2 million and how it's gonna impact our society holistically that you're end up gonna be paying for it anyway.

It's actually, and I hope I'm not oversimplifying it and make it sounds like an easy solve. If you wanna fix this, I don't like having debt. I don't like having deficit. You know how you address it, tax rich people a little bit more and fairly. That's, you're not wrong. And it's actually that simple.

I think there's two important points that people need to really understand here. First of all, exactly as you described the bill is exactly right. The bill literally takes money out of the pockets of low and middle income people and gives it to rich people. That is totally backwards from an economic standpoint, from a moral standpoint, from a budgetary standpoint. And it's also unprecedented. It's actually not something that this country typically does. There's been a bunch of analyses out recently that looked at this tax and budget bill compared

to previous tax and budget bills. And yes, there have been bills in the past, like the Bush tax cuts or the Trump tax cuts from 2017 that disproportionately benefited the wealthy compared to what the benefits were for poor people or middle-income people. Rich people got a bigger benefit. But this is the first time in modern history that the bill will explicitly and directly make people's lives worse so that they can pay for tax cuts for people at the top.

That is so crazy that it's kind of sound when you tell people that they think that can't really be what it's doing. Like, why would anybody do that? But that is exactly what this is doing. And you are exactly right. This is an easy fix. We just need to not cut taxes for rich people. If we just didn't cut taxes for rich people in this bill, you could do all the tax cuts that these people are proposing for middle

income people and poor people and there aren't that many of them or more. And you can still get rid of the cuts to healthcare and food assistance and you'd have the same overall cost. And if you asked rich people to just pay a little bit more of their fair share, to give back just a portion of the tax cuts that they've received over the last 25 years, we could do a whole lot more. We could invest in people's education, in their healthcare, we could reduce the deficit, we could do all of those things. In this country, there are billionaires who pay a lower

tax rate, a lower share of their income in taxes than a teacher or a firefighter or, you know, a garbage worker or a factory worker. That is absolutely indefensible. And this bill will make that worse. And by the way, that is not something that is particularly partisan. Most Republican voters do not wanna cut taxes for rich people or cut Medicaid. Most Republican voters think it's completely ridiculous

that the rich are paying lower tax rates in many cases than the middle class. So the fix is easy. if you had politicians in Washington who were not looking out only for the interests of the super wealthy and giant corporations. Here's the thing I think though, right? This process is complicated, the budget process. It's not like a simple concept. I mean, already it's pretty confusing.

It's like, wait a minute, I thought they passed the budget for months ago. No, that was just the outline. And they did this. And then what was that? Then they voted on cloture. What the hell is cloture? And then there's this committee and then there's a rules markup. And then the House voted. And then some people are like, wait, isn't that a law? No, that's just the House. Now you're bringing it back to the Senate, but wasn't there already a reconciliation? No, that was just a reconciliation on the outline. And now the Senate's looking at what they passed

with the rules committee marked up. And so I think that by the time you get through the process, and this is what I think the Republicans are hoping, that people don't really know what the hell is going on. You layer on top of that 30 other distractions that are now taking place in very serious ones. And before you know it, you have this disastrous budget that that goes into effect. People start losing their healthcare and then what they have to do, what,

or they start getting impacted. Then they just got to play the blame game divide us as americans along cultural lines start really injecting back oh transgender this and you're angry at this split us up and then and then rinse repeat democrat comes in fix it blame the firefighter for putting out the arson the arsonsonist come back in, relight the fire. How do we get out of this cycle, Michael? That's what I guess my... Well, that's your question. That's your simple question. How do we fix American politics? Well, here's how I think we do it. And it's a very self-serving answer. But I'll give you the final word, though. I think to create, no one's having the conversations

that you and I are having here on corporate news, on a data, like no one's getting into the guts of this thing and explaining it. And frankly, I believe I'm explaining it from a nonpartisan basis because I don't think that red state voters should be screwed by this. I don't think blue state vote, but I think the key is educating people

on what's really happening. Let them understand the process and let them know You're being screwed. You're you're the mark and probably if you're a red state voter, you're getting hurt Even you're probably getting way more hurt than I am That's the reality. Yeah, I mean, I think you're I think you're right. I think Look, we have a long we have a long list of problems in this country and Look, we have a long list of problems in this country, and the economy that does not work for most people is underneath a lot of it, not all of it, but a big chunk of it. And I think your intuition is right that regardless of where you live or who you voted for, you

probably do not think it is a good idea to take people's healthcare away in order to pay for tax cuts for rich people. Like this bill is so unbelievably unpopular, including among Republicans and independent voters, precisely for that reason. Yes, people are angry at a lot of things. We have a lot going on in the world. There's lots of bad things in the world.

I don't want to pretend that there's not. But I also think there is actually a pretty broad general consensus that the federal government should be on the side of working people, of people who are struggling to get by, of people who are doing their best and playing by the rules and not on the side of corporations who ship jobs overseas or billionaires who just happen to be the biggest campaign donors. And there is an opportunity here and maybe this

terrible budget bill will be the spark of that opportunity for people to see in each other that common goal of having our government be on our side and not on the side of some billionaire who just can pay the most to whatever the latest Mar-a-Lago dinner is. I do hope that the stakes of this fight are so real, so many people will be hurt. People will lose their insurance. People will pay more for their insurance. People will not have food on the table. I hope that the stakes of this fight will focus us all together on what we share.

We share a desire for an economy that actually delivers for everyday people and a government that can stand on the side of everyday people. That's not what's happening here, despite what the rhetoric was of the Republicans who got elected. They ran on working, you know, working for working people. That's what they ran on, lowering costs and giving people a little breathing room. And the first thing they do is turn around and cut healthcare to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. I think if we can all have a conversation, an

honest conversation about that, I think it could make a difference in the long run. This is a big long process and you're right, they're going to turn around and try to point the blame wherever they can and change the subject. But people's healthcare is their number one subject, is everybody's number one subject, their health, their family, their bottom lines and this bill just, it takes a sledgehammer to all of that. But hey, we've got gigantic flagpoles going up in the White House. Huge, massive flagpoles that are being there.

Hey, Michael Linden, thank you so much for joining us. Michael, as I mentioned at the outset, was a senior advisor at the Office of Management and Budget. He's now the director of an organization called Families Over Billionaires. Thanks, Michael. Thank you. Everybody hit subscribe.