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House Republicans have passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. After having spent decades covering Republican domestic policies, I have a pretty jaundiced view of their intentions. But this bill is so cruelly regressive that it shocked even me. This bill is truly unprecedented in the extent to which it takes away from the have-nots and gives to the ultra-haves. It slashes Medicaid, taking health care away from millions. It slashes food stamps, ensuring that many will go hungry. At the same time it gives huge tax cuts to the wealthy.
Those of us who followed the legislation knew that it would be highly regressive. New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency of economic technocrats, confirm in detail just how bad the OBBBA is.
C.B.O.’s numbers, released yesterday, are startling. Here’s the percentage change in households’ purchasing power by decile of the income distribution caused by the OBBBA:
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That 4 percent income decline for the poorest 10 percent of Americans is the scale of economic damage you’d expect from a severe recession. But here it is being deliberately inflicted on the poorest Americans.
In the OBBBA, pain on the least well-off Americans is not a price that is being paid in order to reduce the U.S. budget deficit. Remember, the benefit cuts for those in the bottom decile of the income distribution are being paired with tax cuts at the top of the income distribution. So the net effect will be a large increase in the U.S. budget deficit.
Wait, it gets worse. The CBO’s analysis doesn’t consider the effect of the Trump tariffs on household incomes. This is important because tariffs are taxes — regressive taxes, that fall more heavily on lower-income than higher-income families. I’ll be writing about the distributional impact of tariffs in the future. But for now here’s the Yale Budget Lab’s estimate of the combined effect of the OBBA and Trump tariffs on US household incomes:
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What this graph shows is that the tariffs magnify the regressive effect of the OBBA: the poorest households are made even worse off. The loss inflicted on the bottom 10% of the income distribution goes from 4% of their income to 6.5%. Overall, the bottom 80% of households suffer a loss of income from the combined effects of the tariffs and the OBBA. Only the top 10% are clearly better off from a bill that increases the budget deficit. That’s quite a trick.
Republicans have already denounced the C.B.O.’s estimates as fake. (Arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias.) They claim, as they always do, that tax cuts for the rich will supercharge economic growth — a claim that has been tested to destruction, and I do mean destruction, over and over again at both the federal and state levels. It has never yet been vindicated.
The fact is that there’s no reasonable way to dispute the basic conclusion of the C.B.O.’s analysis. The Big Beautiful Bill is an immense exercise in reverse Robin-Hoodism, taking resources away from those who need them and giving the money to the already rich while driving up the deficit, increasing interest rates and crowding out investment..
The OBBBA is, in fact, so terrible that we need to ask how any party in a democracy imagines that it could get away with taking money away from 80% of the American public.
My answer is that the G.O.P.’s vicious tax and spending plans can’t be separated from the party’s contempt for democracy. The House has just enacted legislation that is desperately unpopular and would be even less popular if the public understood it fully. Why, then, did House members vote for it? Because they fear Donald Trump more than they fear the voters or because they don’t believe we will ever have fair elections again. Or both.
Also, what’s with the bill’s peculiar name? And yes, it is officially the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” While it might seem odd to focus on its name, there is a real, important link between a certain kind of vulgar tackiness and authoritarian rule. Milan Kundera, author of “The unbearable lightness of being,” called it “totalitarian kitsch.” By giving their bill a ludicrous name, because those were Trump’s words, G.O.P. politicians were engaging in performative self-abasement, demonstrating their willingness to humiliate themselves in order to curry favor with the Leader.
So by calling the legislation the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans were in effect confirming that yes, Washington has turned into Pyongyang on the Potomac, where political survival depends on slavish flattery of the dictator.
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