Ben Shapiro: “The child tax credit is essentially a giveaway to people who don't pay taxes in the first place”
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From the July 2, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): What exactly is in the latest version of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill? Well, the making permanent of the Trump tax cuts.
And again, so much of what happened with this bill is rooted in an unbelievably stupid idea, which is that if you're going to assess the additional debt created by the bill, we have to assume that the tax cuts are going to expire, so-called baseline budgeting. The idea was that since the tax cuts were set to sunset at a certain point, that we would simply assume that the tax expenditures coming into the government, the tax revenue to the government, would automatically increase. And so if you maintain the tax rates at the same rate, that actually was increasing the deficit, which again is sort of a weird accounting trick. And that necessitated cuts in other areas in order to offset those supposed additions to the deficit.
The projected cost of the continuation of the tax cuts, some $4 trillion dollars. But, again, that's a continue — it's not a new tax cut. It's a continuation of current tax rates preventing a reversal of the tax cuts. The state and local tax deduction, that provision would allow people to deduct up to $40,000 dollars per year for five years from their federal income taxes. As part of the compromise with the Senate Republicans, the cap would go back down to $10,000 dollars per year after five years. Now in reality, again, is it likely to sunset like that? Pretty unlikely.
The bill also includes no tax on tips, overtime, and car loans. It includes making permanent the annual child tax credit at a level of $2,200 dollars. House Republicans wanna bump it to $2,500 bucks and then scale it back to $2,000 dollars after 2028.
And, again, the child tax credit is essentially a giveaway to people who don't pay taxes in the first place, like the earned income tax credit. Very often, you're giving a tax credit to people who don't pay taxes, so it's just a check.
The bill would provide Customs and Border Patrol with $47 billion dollars to build the wall and associated infrastructure like access roads, cameras, lights, and sensors. It also includes $2 billion dollars for Department of Homeland Security and about $30 billion dollars for ICE. The bill includes $25 billion dollars for President Trump's Golden Dome missile defense system, another $30 billion dollars for shipbuilding, $15 billion dollars for nuclear deterrent.