The juxtaposition on the weekend was apt: one large, ugly invoice in Washington and one large, garish wedding ceremony in Venice.
That is what days of Senate debate over President Trump and Republicans’ almost 1,000-page laws had in frequent with the times of revelry on the $50-million nuptials of the world’s-third-richest-man, Jeff Bezos, and ever-couture-corseted Lauren Sánchez: an exhibit of extra for a brand new Gilded Age, encapsulating the gulf between the have-nots and the have-yachts. (Venice’s “yacht ports” had been reportedly all booked for the marriage, although not by Bezos’ personal 417-foot-long “Koru.”)
The president was invited, natch, however he was a no-show. Take into account his laws his reward to the blissful couple. Sánchez and Bezos have a lot to like in Trump’s absurdly titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” making its means by way of the Republican-run Congress. However Bezos’ Amazon staff and lots of of his cut-rate-shopping prospects? Not a lot.
This can be probably the most inequitable and overtly reverse-Robin Hood funds behemoth ever. It might make everlasting and increase upon the deep Trump tax cuts of 2017 that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. The multitrillion-dollar value can be offset by about $1 trillion in healthcare cuts, principally to the Medicaid program that serves greater than 70 million folks. Different cuts would finish clean-energy initiatives (costing jobs and ceding the alternative-energy future to China) and slash diet applications for the needy. In the meantime, spending would enhance roughly 15-fold for immigration enforcement, paying for purposely merciless detention facilities similar to Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Backside line: about $3.5 trillion in additional debt over simply the following 10 years, in response to the Congressional Funds Workplace.
This monstrosity would exacerbate what’s already record income inequality in the US. It might reverse the previous decade’s decline, underneath Obamacare, within the variety of People with out medical health insurance, inflicting about 17 million folks to lose protection, in response to the health-policy nonprofit KFF. Extra rural hospitals, reliant on Medicaid, would shut. Neglect the “trivialities of Medicaid coverage,” tweeted Vice President JD Vance, supposed elegist of hillbillies and different downtrodden People — it’s the additional immigration crackdown money that counts.
Healthcare threats loom whilst two analysis papers lately reported that Obamacare and its Medicaid growth have saved the lives of many low-income adults. One study final month discovered that the proposed cuts might enhance preventable deaths by almost 17,000 yearly. The other, in Could, concluded that as a lot as 20% of the well-documented disparity within the lifespans of low- and high-income People, with the latter dwelling longer, is attributable to the dearth of medical health insurance amongst these with decrease incomes.
In different phrases, the supposed One Massive Lovely Invoice Act can be a killer.
That, in fact, can be the worst of it. However different descriptors are so damning that solely Trump’s dying grip on fellow Republicans can clarify why they’d vote for this politically suicidal bundle. With polls this bad, the 2026 midterm elections can’t come quickly sufficient to eject Republicans’ rubberstamping majority in Congress and examine Trump’s insanity.
“The most important upward switch of wealth in American historical past,” said the Atlantic of the invoice’s particulars. “The most important reduce to applications for low-income People ever,” according to funds guru Bobby Kogan on the left-leaning Middle for American Progress. “The most costly piece of laws most likely for the reason that Sixties,” said analyst Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute, “… piling trillions of latest borrowing on prime of deficits which are already leaping.”
That pile-up couldn’t occur at a worse time.
For many years, funds consultants have warned of a coming fiscal tsunami by the 2020s that may swamp the financial system as retiring boomers drew from Social Safety, Medicare and Medicaid whereas federal revenues had been drained by tax cuts. But Republican presidents and Congresses saved slicing taxes and, in league with Democrats, did not make essential and comparatively painless changes to the so-called entitlement profit applications.
And now right here we’re, knifing Medicaid not to make it and the general funds extra fiscally sound, however to offset the price of extra tax cuts favoring the rich, driving up debt.
Trump, plainly peeved at discuss that he’ll break his first-term document of probably the most debt in a presidential time period ($8.4 trillion), on Wednesday whined in a post, “No one desires to speak about GROWTH.”
People are on to this fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves. Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump 1.0 all slashed tax charges disproportionately for the wealthy and companies, claiming that financial progress would assist scale back deficits. They had been improper. For Trump to do it once more and count on a special outcome, is, because the saying goes, the definition of insanity. The one latest Republican president who helped scale back deficits was George H.W. Bush as a result of he raised taxes as a part of a balanced, bipartisan bundle of spending cuts and tax will increase — shared sacrifice, one thing Trump is aware of nothing about.
Simply because the Senate was ending its vote to cross Trump’s invoice on Tuesday, sending it again to the Home, Sen. Angus King, an unbiased from Maine, was heard shouting to Republican senators as he exited, “Disgrace on you guys.”
Doesn’t he know by now that Trump and his social gathering minions haven’t any disgrace?
In Venice, Bezos the billionaire groom got here in for some razzing too. A huge banner carpeted the famed Piazza San Marco earlier than his three-day bacchanalia: “Should you can lease Venice on your wedding ceremony you may pay extra tax.”
Bezos might, however he gained’t. We’ve gone past trickle-down tax politics. It’s bottoms up for Bezos, different billionaires and all of the mere millionaires. We’ll all undergo the hangover, nevertheless, and none greater than probably the most needy amongst us.
@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes
