The biggest political spin room on Tuesday night was not in Las Vegas for the Republican debate, but in the corridors of Congress, with Democratic and Republican leaders alike justifying the massive year-end spending and tax bill as a victory for their side. The real winner, however, appears to be the Grover Norquist-style principle of “starve the beast,” the idea that you can endlessly cut taxes as a pretext to crying poor about funding for government services.

The final deal has two major parts. One is an omnibus appropriations bill, the spending levels of which were set out in late October. Then there’s a “tax extenders” package, estimated at between $650 and $670 billion, the majority of which goes to tax breaks for corporations. None of those tax extenders is paid for, even while very miniscule increases in spending programs, like the $4.6 billion reauthorization of the Zadroga Act for 9/11 first responders’ health needs, must have a funding source.

You can see the inequity here: Every inch of spending on programs must be accounted for and offset, while spending through the tax code is magical, and need not be offset at all. Lawmakers certainly get the message—it’s simply easier to cut taxes than create new programs. And eventually, conservatives can use this dynamic to decry the “runaway deficit” and demand spending cuts. This is how you drown government in a bathtub.

Not every new tax cut benefits corporations: There is some good news for working families as well. Stimulus-created expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and American Opportunity Tax Credit (for college students) will be made permanent, without stringent eligibility requirements proposed by Republicans that would have made it harder for recent immigrants to legally access benefits. That adds up to about $200 billion in benefits for individuals over 10 years.

But that’s dwarfed by the tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy in the bill, which in sum equal about $470 billion. Some of these breaks, like a permanent research and development tax credit ($110 billion), are relatively anodyne. But the “active financing exception” ($78 billion) enables financial institutions to defer taxes on income earned outside the United States. This creates incentives for accounting tricks to make it look like interest, dividends, or other income comes from overseas. It effectively legalizes foreign tax havens.