Vice President JD Vance said something during a Luzerne County rally Wednesday that needed a good amount of context.
“The mainstream media, the corporate press, doesn’t like what we accomplished,” he bellowed toward the crowd in West Pittston, as he touted the One Big, Beautiful Bill that made President Donald Trump’s tax-and-spend policies law. “It doesn’t like what we did.”
There’s something Vance, Trump, every one of their devout supporters and hardline members of their administration should understand: We would like it if they’re right; we would also like the bill’s critics to be proven wrong.
We would like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill will increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion between now and 2034 to turn out to be a wildly inaccurate product of bad math from what the administration has labeled a “partisan and political” government entity.
We would like to believe — as our own U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-8, Dallas Twp., maintains — the CBO’s estimates of $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade somehow aren’t cuts at all.
We want to look back in a decade at the early consternation surrounding the bill’s passage and be able to say it all turned out to be unfounded, that the bill’s benefits were met and exceeded, and that fears of those who are hungry, sick and feeling unheard and uncared about by those who championed it were unfounded.
It’s just a whole lot easier to believe math than it is politicians.
We remain concerned that parts of the bill Vance raved about Wednesday are much more effective as a rallying cry on the campaign trail for Republicans than they are actual, difference-making policies for average Americans.
Specifically, that centers on the two tenets of the law Republicans tend…
