Two cheers on passing the tax bill — too bad spending’s still out of control

Congratulations to President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson for getting the Big Beautiful Bill through the House; this was a vital win for Trump’s agenda.

That said, we can’t help but mourn the missed opportunity to truly cut federal spending, which remains on an unsustainable trajectory that guarantees future fiscal disaster.

No, we’re not whining that the BBB “increases the deficit”: Virtually the bill’s entire impact in that sense comes from fending off massive preprogramed tax hikes that would derail the economy.

Keeping tax rates constant — along with enhanced border security and other core parts of Trump’s agenda — is a heavy lift in its own right, given Republicans’ narrow majorities in the House and Senate and Democrats’ still-lockstep opposition to anything and everything Trump.

Nor is success yet certain: The Senate must have its say, and then the two chambers will need to split their differences and vote again.

Still, eventually the president and his allies need to level with the American people about the hard but simple truth that spending has shot up too far, too fast — and with no good justification.

Federal outlays are up more than $2 trillion a year over the prepandemic level, from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $6.8 trillion in 2024.

That’s a rise of over 50%, massively above inflation — and for what?

Mainly, for what Dems consider “investment”: More subsidies for favored companies, more giveaways to “nonprofit” special interests, more payments to states like New York and California to support their big-government initiatives.

Yet the Republicans blinked at rolling back practically any of it, let alone all.

Even though next to no average American can point to anything Uncle Sam is doing for him that he wasn’t before the pandemic; how would a rollback hurt that much?

We get it: Even the minimal trims in the bill have Democrats screaming about millions of people losing their health insurance, etc.; House members in swing seats fear giving the opposition even more to grandstand about — and the bill only passed with a vote or two to spare.

Nearly everyone in Washington thinks the voters don’t want to hear the truth, but sooner or later they’ll need to, because this literally can’t go on.

And the later the course-correction begins, the deeper the hole the country will be in, and the greater the pain to get out of it.

So the sooner our leaders start taking some truth-telling risks, the better.