More double-talk and hypocrisy from our Republican congressional delegation. In his recent op-ed, Senator Steve Daines claims that by voting for the Big Beautiful Bill and preserving the 2017 tax cuts, he helped Montanans by avoiding “one of the largest tax hikes in American history.” Here’s the truth: the 2017 tax cuts were deliberately made to be temporary in order to bypass congressional rules about balancing the budget (a process called “budget reconciliation”). Congress knew in 2017 that, if made permanent, the tax cuts would increase the deficit – at the time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the cuts would add $1.4 trillion over ten years to the national debt – so the Republican-led Congress used a bad-faith trick to pass the cuts anyway.
Meanwhile, the purported benefits of those tax cuts never materialized. In April 2025, the Congressional Research Service (Congress’s very own think tank) found that the cuts gave no benefit to the economy. The Tax Policy Center, the American Association of Economists, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities all found the same thing. Daines was in Congress then and now, so he knows all of this.
What the tax cuts did do is make the rich richer. Instead of avoiding a supposed tax hike, Daines (and Dowling, Zinke, and Sheehy) actually just voted to create what the Yale Budget Project called “the largest upward transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history,” while simultaneously adding, per the CBO, over $3 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal responsibility and looking out for the little man.
Adam Leigland
Great Falls