I probably haven't ever paid so much attention to what's going on in government in general, or Congress in particular. But the bill just passed.

There was a lot of debate, a bunch of grandstanding, and a whole bunch of BS spread around.

The bill, briefly commented on previously, is a monstrous read that reads a lot like the output of a diff command, or as a list of post-its in an agile project describing tiny verbiage changes. The context and impact of those edits is hard to determine if you don't do the research and look at the referenced materials. As such, many congresspeople have come out and admitted "I didn't know this was what it is."

Voting was unsurprisingly along party lines with very few deviations. The Democrats all voted against the bill through its entire process. A small number of Republicans also voted against it on occasion, but never enough to put a stop to it. There was debate and posturing that made it seem like people were trying to do good things, but it also seemed like a lot more were trying to get their little add-ins added in. The whole history of voting is at https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1 including the initial House pass to the Senate, and the Senate pass back to the House. The vote just finished in the House, passing as noted, but hasn't yet been updated on the site.

In this budget reform, there are a number of spending cuts and tax cuts. There are some adjustments to spending, and some new spending. There's a bunch of new definitions and re-definitions. There's a notorious protection of AI, and a bunch of language allowing stronger immigration enforcement (seemingly allowing bypass of due process). They "protected" public services by adding bureaucratic obstacles, which will likely reduce use by people needing, earning, and entitled to the benefits by making it difficult to acquire and retain.

In general, though, the spending cuts aren't as deep as the tax cuts, so there is a spending deficit. By congressional accounting, it should amount to about 3.5 trillion dollars of additional deficit at the end of their 10 year projection.

After the bill passed, there have been a number of broadcast interviews. Of course, there are the "we did it" from the Republicans, and the "this is going to be bad" from the Democrats.

The frustrating comments are the "we couldn't stop it, and are hoping to get this through and make appropriate changes in the future" garbage statements from Republicans who really could have stopped it. 

And I'm very done with the anti-Biden rhetoric. The Biden administration did not shift or change enough to deserve it, and in so many instances it's a clear attempt to cast blame. It's used too often in a case where it's clear the speaker doesn't have a good answer, so they turn to a distracting, often unrelated, blame game instead.

I'm in the bucket of people most likely to benefit from the tax breaks, and least likely to need the impacted services. Even though I might get a bit of a break in taxes that I pay, I'm more disappointed that the people not in the same bucket have now been saddled with more difficulty.

I'm going to try to go back to not knowing what's going on.