Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Slashes Aid for the Poor to Enrich the Ultra-Rich
On May 22, House Republicans voted to give Elon Musk a massive tax break at the cost of thousands of American lives, leading critics to label it “the murder budget.”
Trump’s congressional lackeys have taken his advice, calling the “Big Beautiful Bill,” presumably because of all the goodies in it for Trump and his allies. But whatever you call it, it directly contradicts Trump’s campaign promises last year.
“Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched,” Trump said during the campaign. “We’re going to love and cherish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, we’re not going to do anything with that.” He was smart to say that. A Data For Progress poll found that support for cutting Medicaid doesn’t exceed 15% in any congressional district in America.
But with Trump pushing hard, Republicans in Congress are poised to pass the mother of all reverse Robin Hood budgets, transferring more than a trillion dollars from the pockets of poor and working-class Americans into the bank vaults of the rich and super-rich. Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) will all face drastic, unprecedented cuts, millions of Americans will lose health insurance, and thousands upon thousands will die, leading some to call it a murder budget. “Hospitals in your districts will close. Nursing homes will shut down,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned. “People will die.”
The bill will add approximately $3.8 trillion to federal deficits, driven in large part by $5 trillion in tax cuts over ten years, overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy. “The $121 billion in net tax cuts going to the richest 1 percent next year would exceed the amount going to the entire bottom 60 percent of taxpayers (about $90 billion),” according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. But most of the latter would be canceled out by tariffs. The bottom 40% would see net losses.
But that’s relatively good news.
Medicaid cuts of roughly $700 billion will result in the loss of coverage by somewhere between 9.7 million and 14.4 million people, according to a state-by-state projection from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (Millions more will lose coverage as private marketplace tax credits expire.) Loss of life can be projected based on a new study by economists at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, which found that Medicaid expansion under Obamacare saved 27,400 lives between 2010 and 2020, while states that failed to expand Medicaid missed the chance to save 12,800 more lives. Exact figures are impossible to estimate, but thousands will surely die as a direct result of this bill. And while lives lost are the starkest measure of the murder budget’s cruelty, the hardship imposed is far more widespread.
In addition to the Medicaid cuts of roughly $700 billion, cuts to SNAP will come close to $300 billion (with 3.2 million people losing benefits), and cuts to Medicare (required by law because of the increased deficit) will top $500 billion. The cuts will have severely damaging ripple effects as well. The combination of closed rural hospitals and reduced agricultural income from SNAP will hurt Trump-supporting rural communities especially hard.
At the same time, deficits will soar and long-term investments in a carbon-free future — largely centered in Trump-supporting red states — will be terminated, essentially ceding the energy future to China, while a $350 billion cut from education and workplace training further undermines future economic growth. These combined with Trump’s hostility to higher education, science, foreigners, and the rule of law — made manifest in a barrage of executive actions — strike a deadly blow at long-term pillars of American prosperity, while Trump remains obsessed with false images of America’s past.
Sadistic Zombie Ideas Behind The Murder Budget
“Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote on Substack, but what’s notable is “its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas. … Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.”
The two chief zombie ideas he cited are that tax cuts for the rich will fuel an economic boom, and that those receiving government support are unworthy malingerers who should just get a job. Both have been repeatedly refuted, only to rise again from the dead. Most conclusively, a 2020 study using data from 18 industrial nations since the 1970s found “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Work requirements to exclude the unworthy are more varied in form, but the only direct parallel is unambiguous. When Arkansas implemented the first-ever work requirements in Medicaid in 2018, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that it “was associated with significant losses in health insurance coverage in the initial 6 months of the policy but no significant change in employment.” [Emphasis added]
As for those who lost coverage, “Nearly all of the people who lost coverage had met the requirements,” professors Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan noted in a recent New York Times op-ed. “They simply couldn’t manage the paperwork to prove it.”
Combined, the two zombie ideas equate to saying that the way to grow the economy is to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. Unsurprisingly, it just ain’t so. The Wharton School Budget Model finds that as a result, “The average wage falls slightly in 10 years.”
But there’s more to the zombie attack than just those two key zombie ideas Krugman cites, destructive and dangerous as they may be. Trump has his own idiosyncratic zombie ideas with impacts going well beyond the budget bill, and the net result could well end up turning America into a shattered zombie shell of itself.
Killing The Geese That Lay America’s Golden Eggs
Combine Trump’s zombie tariff idea with his love of coal, and his belief that manufacturing jobs are intrinsically better than other jobs — ignoring the role of industrial unions in making them so — and you have a recipe for utterly disastrous economic policy, with the budget bill and his tariffs as two main pillars, but a lot of other shabby scaffolding as well.
The murder budget’s rollback of Joe Biden’s green energy tax incentives would be economically disastrous, according to analysis from Energy Innovation published in Forbes. The bill would “grind our economy to a halt by stealing 830,000 jobs by 2030, costing America more than $1 trillion in GDP by 2034, and increasing power prices 50% by 2035,” they reported.
Another key sector threatened by Trump, the tourism industry, is facing “an unprecedented decline in tourism revenue in 2025,” according to analysis from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), in partnership with Oxford Economics. The industry is poised to lose approximately $12.5 billion in revenue this year alone, which represents a staggering 22% drop from the 2019 pre-pandemic peak. That’s no drop in the bucket, since the industry contributes directly and indirectly to 9% of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Trump’s hostility to higher education, with massive cuts in the budget following early cuts by executive order, strikes at one of America’s key, generations-long economic advantages. Tellingly, the only tax actually raised on the wealthy in the bill targeted college endowments, whose largest single purpose is to support student aid. “The endowment tax effectively funnels charitable gifts from donors to the federal government without doing anything beneficial for students, and is a tax on scholarships, research, and charitable giving,” the American Council on Education said in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Jeffries that 17 other educational organizations co-signed.
Higher education is considered the 10th-largest U.S. export, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis. International students contributed more than $44 billion to the U.S. economy last year, more than the total value of America’s telecommunications and information services exports.
Almost simultaneously, the Trump administration sought to expel all international students from Harvard — roughly a quarter of its student body. Harvard professor of medicine Jeremy Faust appeared on MSNBC to put the attack on Harvard’s international student community in a broader context.
“Nobel Prizes is a good way to understand the ripple effects of the community. The United States has what, 4% of the world’s population, but we have over 40% of the Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Physiology in the last century,” Faust said. “We [Harvard] may be the focus today, but we are just the emblem of the entire system that works. The system that says, we develop the best scientists and we attract the rest, and then we put it in the system that has public and private collaboration, that has results.”
Afterwards, Faust wrote on Substack, “I do hope to return to the airwaves to describe more of the research that has been affected by the Trump administration’s shortsighted, DOGE-driven cuts that threaten to end a century of American dominance in biomedical and scientific research.”
Another nearly-simultaneous Trump action was to declare a 50% tariff on the European Union, starting June 1 — a month earlier than the 90-day negotiating period he previously announced. Another MSNBC guest, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers, explained how profoundly counterproductive this was. “Right now, any manufacturing company in the world can buy precision German machinery without a 50% markup. Any company can do that except those in the United States. See what that’s done with American competitiveness right there?” he asked.
Trump has subsequently backed away again, delaying the EU tariffs until July 9, again swapping one kind of uncertainty for another, leading to another wave of stories about near-term economic consequences.
But as Wolfers noted in that interview, economists ask bigger questions, “We ask what makes some countries rich, like the United States, and some countries poor, like Argentina? Well, in fact, Argentina used to be rich a hundred years ago. It was one of the richest countries in the world. It was set to be as rich as any of us,” he said. But, “They put in place a set of political institutions that basically meant they were unable to provide the guideposts for stable economic policy and the guideposts for businesses to invest.” He went on to say, “We don’t spend enough time talking about which could undermine the state of the economy, not next year in a possible recession, but for our kids. And the effects here are huge. Realize that some countries are 50 times richer countries. And those differences aren’t about differences in the weather. They’re about economic structures.”
But sound economic structures are the last thing on Trump’s mind. On the evening after the House passed the murder budget, Trump hosted a party for 220 buyers of his meme coin, which had netted Trump-affiliated businesses $312 million from crypto sales and $43 million in total fees, according to a Washington Post analysis. Meme coins “have limited or no use or functionality,” the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in February, a view that Trump himself shared until very recently. Last year, he said cryptocurrencies seem “like a scam” and have values that are “based on thin air.”
Now, however, they’re a major source of Trump’s wealth, with his low-information supporters once again footing the bill. In early February, a New York Times analysis found that early traders made massive profits — more than $109 million in one case, while more than 810,000 had suffered $2 billion in losses after its price crashed. In short, it’s the same sort of reverse Robin Hood wealth transfer found in his beloved “Big Beautiful [Murder] Bill.”