Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) (C) signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during an enrollment ceremony with fellow Republicans in the Rayburn Room at the U.S. Capitol on July 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) (C) signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during an enrollment ceremony with fellow Republicans in the Rayburn Room at the U.S. Capitol on July 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If we think about the economic effects of President Donald Trumps big taxing and spending and domestic policy bill, we can roughly sum it up in one line. It goes something like this:

We will make many big tax cuts permanent and pay for those tax cuts by cutting Medicaid and a few other things and also…by borrowing money.

A lot of money.

Even more than we’ve already been borrowing over the past twenty years. (And that was already a lot, too!)

Today: simple arithmetic with profound ramifications. Tax cuts, spending cuts, and whether they balance out. (Spoiler: no.)

We look under the hood to see how all this is calculated. And we ask: how will a bigger deficit play out for all of us, in our normal, regular lives?

We’ve covered a bunch more having to do with the big taxing and spending bill and the federal debt recently on Planet Money and our short daily show The Indicator:

This episode was hosted by Sally Helm, Kenny Malone and Mary Childs. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Cooper Katz McKim. It was edited by Jess Jiang and our executive producer Alex Goldmark. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

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Music: Universal Production Music – “Shoot Me Down,” “Matador Enters,” “Time to Spare,” and “Wildwoods”