The “big, beautiful bill”

If a satirist had tried to produce a caricature of legislation designed to steal from the working class to give to the rich, they couldn’t have produced anything more transparent than the “big, beautiful bill” that the U.S. House of Representatives passed by one vote on May 22.

Trump gave the silly “big, beautiful” name to the massive, 1,100-page bill that increases the U.S. budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. It incorporates all the GOP’s plans to cut taxes for the richest Americans, while raising costs and imperiling the health and education of millions of working-class Americans.

Simultaneously, it calls for a military budget that exceeds $1 trillion annually for the first time, and a vast expansion of the deportation apparatus that is the core of Trump’s program.

Just how tilted to the rich is the “big, beautiful bill”? The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office showed that the bill would decrease the household incomes by up to 4 percent annually of the poorest tenth of Americans, while increasing the income of the richest tenth by up to 4 percent annually. If you look at these shifts in dollar terms, you see that the poorest 40 percent of the population loses money while the richest .1% (one tenth of 1 percent) gains about $390,000!

These shifts are the cumulation of tax cuts that are tilted to the upper end of the income distribution, and the slashing and burning of Medicaid (government-provided health insurance for the poor and disabled) and SNAP, the food assistance program for low-income people. Cuts to these two essential programs amount to more than $1.2 trillion over a decade. The data journalist G. Elliott Morris summed it up, “The Republicans want you to pay more for less”.

Another lesser-known impact will be mandatory cuts of up to $500 billion to Medicare, the government medical insurance program for the elderly. Along with Social Security payments to the elderly and disabled, Medicare is so popular that it is usually considered “safe” from cuts. For this austerity measure, we have the 2010 Democratic Congress, led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and then-President Barack Obama. They pushed through the “Pay As You Go Act,” that forced mandatory cuts to these programs if the federal budget deficit exceeded certain levels.

The impacts of these cuts—in a country where 4 of 10 people can’t assemble $400 to spend in case of an emergency, and where almost 80 percent report living “paycheck to paycheck”—will be devastating. Analysts predict as many as 15 million will lose health coverage as the federal government imposes greater restrictions on who can obtain benefits, and states are unable to fill the gaps.

Medicaid is not just a program for the poorest Americans. Through the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Act and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, Medicaid now provides health insurance assistance to almost 80 million Americans. In fact, it has more enrollees than does Medicare.

So, in many ways that aren’t fully apparent, Medicaid is a crucial support to millions of working-class Americans. It is the main funder of nursing home and home care for the elderly and disabled. In many parts of urban and rural America, it supports the public health infrastructure. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 65 percent of people—either themselves, family members or close friends—have benefitted from Medicaid.

These cuts are not popular. In none of the 435 congressional districts do more than 15 percent of voters support cuts to the SNAP food assistance program. Even Trump’s far-right adviser Steve Bannon warned Republicans against cutting Medicaid. But they did anyway. And even House Republicans who swore they wouldn’t support a bill that cut Medicaid voted for it anyway. They will now spend months playing word games trying to explain that their vote wasn’t for a “cut” but for something else.

In another attack on working people, the bill also slashes education grants that help low-income students afford college. As many as 4 million students will be affected. And new provisions applying to student loans will raise payments and lengthen periods of debt for most borrowers.

This account has only focused on cuts to medical care, food assistance, and education support. The idea that Trump and the Republicans are somehow now a “working-class party” is laughable.

But the rest of the bill is a Trumpite wish list, including: a 13 fold increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s carceral system; allowing the administration to terminate the tax-exempt status of any non-profit it deems politically unacceptable; barring state regulation of artificial intelligence technology; even crippling plaintiffs’ ability to seek court injunctions blocking administration actions.

The bill now goes to the Senate where some Republicans have vowed not to support it, have called for large-scale changes in it, etc. etc. Don’t believe them. Most of the critics don’t believe it goes far enough in cutting spending. Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) plea of “Don’t Cut Medicaid” in a New York Times op ed owes more to political theater than to political conviction.

At the end of the day, the bill represents the entirety of the Trump/Republican domestic policy agenda. And even though the senate may tinker around on the edges of it, it will pass the Congress largely intact. In the senate, where the GOP holds a 53-47 majority, three Republicans can vote against it and it will still pass with Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote.

By the fall, the U.S. working class will begin to experience the most serious legislative assault on it in more than half a century.