Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to have back at the show, staff writer at The Atlantic, writing about American

politics and policy and triggering John Padorets in the far left daily. It's Jonathan

Chate. What's happening? I'm so glad to be on your show again, Tim. It's good to have you.

So we have passed, the House rather, has passed by one vote, what they've termed the big

beautiful bill, Sarah Longwell and Bill Crystal are trying to rebrand as the big, fugly turd.

And I guess you have an article out this morning about how it's the largest upward wealth

transfer in American history.

Why don't we just get your overall reaction, then we'll kind of go through the policy and

politics of it.

It's pretty shocking in a way that Republicans were willing to absorb the political and

economic risks that this legislation is going to cause them. The political risks of combining

two unpopular things, tax cuts for the rich and Medicaid cuts and the economic risks of blowing up the deficit at a time when interest rates are high and rising and interest payments are already a trillion dollars a year and the recovery is teetering from the trade war.

To me, the argument I make in this piece is that just shows the level of ideological

commitment they have to the project of shrinking redistribution. And that's really been

the major theme of my writing since I started in journalism, the Republican Party's just absolutely

implacable commitment to shrinking redistribution. They just hate when the government

taxes rich people to give money to people who aren't rich. They think it's just wrong. It's unfair

at a cosmic level and they'll do anything they can to roll it back. And that's what they're doing now.

Not to in any way, you know, minimize the work that you've been doing in journalism,

talking about the Republicans love for tax cuts for the rich for the past couple decades.

It does feel like this is the worst example of it for a variety of reasons. Like, one, it is

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