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10 Ways the GOP’s Big Ugly Bill Could Hurt You
Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us.
Jul 09, 2025
The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed by the narrowest of margins in Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump, represents the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since chattel slavery.
The slashing of vital services will cause a surge of economic insecurity and preventable deaths while massive hikes in military and deportation funding will serve to perpetuate endless wars and the senseless destruction of immigrant families and their communities.
1. Death by Denial of Healthcare
Cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, combined with new administrative hurdles to accessing benefits, could result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year. Overall, the new law and other policy changes from the Trump administration will likely strip health insurance from about 17 million people. Research shows that the rigid, red tape-laden work requirements in the bill are unlikely to actually increase employment. Most Medicaid enrollees already work, and even those who do work can end up without healthcare if red tape trips up their ability to prove it. Those who do not work are often caring for family members or attending school or have a disability. Formerly incarcerated people also face particularly high barriers to employment.
2. Hospital Apocalypse
The budget reduces the allowable Medicaid provider taxes that many states use to fund this vital program. The threat is particularly severe for rural hospitals because they rely more heavily on Medicaid revenue than urban facilities. More than 700 rural hospitals are already at risk of closure, and at least 338 rural hospitals, including hospitals in nearly every state, are at increased risk due to changes in this budget. To buy off critics, Republicans included a rural health fund that is expected to cover less than a third of projected rural Medicaid losses.
3. Taking Food From the Mouths of Hungry People
New work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will take food assistance from millions of people, including children and veterans. As with Medicaid, new work requirements for SNAP would have little effect on employment but would cause more children to go hungry.
4. Squeezing States on SNAP
This vital food program has always been fully federally funded, but the newly passed budget will require states to take on a significant share of the costs. This unprecedented burden shift will likely lead many states to cut enrollees or even terminate food aid programs for the first time since their inception, causing even more people to go hungry.
5. Barring Lawfully Present Immigrants From Aid
Hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants, including children, who’ve fled persecution and violence in their home countries in search of safety in the United States (refugees, asylum-seekers, some victims of sex or labor trafficking, some victims of domestic violence, and people with temporary protected status) will lose access to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare, ACA tax credits, and SNAP benefits. And 2.6 million U.S. citizen children who live with only an undocumented adult are expected to lose their Child Tax Credit.
6. Terrorizing Immigrant Families
The GOP budget provides roughly another $170 billion to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, and for a border wall and militarization in the next few years. That includes $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities—a 265% increase on an annual basis that would primarily benefit private companies contracted to build and run detention facilities. It includes an additional $29.9 billion for deportation operations and $46.6 billion for border wall construction.
7. Takes From the Poor to Give to the Rich
New tax policies would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest households. Cuts to healthcare, student loans, and other vital services would wipe out the minor tax benefits for working families. A Yale analysis of the bill’s combined tax and spending policies finds that the poorest 20% of households would suffer a net income loss of $700 per year on average while the top 1% would receive a $30,000 increase.
Other tax changes benefit the wealthiest while leaving the poorest without help. Despite modest increases in the maximum Child Tax Credit, the budget will still deny benefits to an estimated 17 million children whose parents earn too little to receive the full credit. For the wealthy, changes to the estate tax mean that wealthy heirs will enjoy a one-time tax savings of $6.4 million while 99.8% of American families would not get a single penny from this tax cut.
8. Leaving Corporations to Enjoy Their Spoils
The budget keeps the corporate tax rate at 21%, a drastic reduction from the 35% pre-2018 rate—despite the fact that ordinary workers have not benefited from this rate reduction. The budget also includes more than $1 billion in new tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry—on top of existing subsidies for the industry that accelerate climate change while costing taxpayers an estimated $17 billion per year.
9. Rewarding Polluters While Raising Energy Costs
The budget allows oil and gas companies to avoid paying fees for polluting methane leaks that are a major cause of climate change, while cuts to clean energy subsidies could mean that household energy bills could spike by $415 a year over the next decade.
10. Funding War and Enriching War Profiteers
President Trump is requesting a record-high $1.011 trillion for the Pentagon and war for FY 2026. Because regular appropriations bills require a 60-vote Senate majority, the GOP included a $150 billion boost for the Pentagon through the reconciliation bill, which requires only a straight majority. They included $25 billion to begin building the “Golden Dome,” a missile defense system that is economically and physically impossible and would only drain more money from social programs to enrich wealthy Pentagon contractors, including Elon Musk; as well as $14 billion for new artificial-intelligence-driven weapons that will further enrich tech companies while making wars more deadly.
A Moral Budget Versus Policy Violence
Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us. By fairly taxing the wealthy and big corporations, reducing our bloated military budget, and demilitarizing immigration policy, we could free up more than enough public funds to ensure we can all survive and thrive. As our country approaches its 250th anniversary, we have no excuse for not investing our national resources in ways that reflect our constitutional values: to establish justice, domestic tranquility, real security, and the general welfare for all.
This analysis was produced by the Institute for Policy Studies for Repairers of the Breach.
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2% Wealth Tax on Just 3,000 Billionaires Could Raise $250 Billion a Year: Nobel Economists
"Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible."
Jul 07, 2025
Seven Nobel laureates on Monday published an op-ed advocating for "a minimum tax for the ultrarich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth," in the French newspaper Le Monde.
"They have never been so wealthy and yet contribute very little to the public coffers: From Bernard Arnault to Elon Musk, billionaires have significantly lower tax rates than the average taxpayer," wrote Daron Acemoglu, George Akerlof, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Citing pioneering research from the E.U. Tax Observatory, the renowned economists noted that "ultrawealthy individuals pay around 0% to 0.6% of their wealth in income tax. In a country like the United States, their effective tax rate is around 0.6%, while in a country like France, it is closer to 0.1%."
Although the "ultrawealthy can easily structure their wealth to avoid income tax, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of tax justice," the strategies for doing so differ by region, the experts detailed. Europeans often use family holding companies that are banned in the United States, "which explains why the wealthy are more heavily taxed there than in Europe—though some have still managed to find workarounds."
The good news is that "there is no inevitability here. Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible," argued the economists, who say that taxing the overall wealth of the ultrarich, not just income, is the key.
The wealth tax approach, they wrote, "is effective because it targets all forms of tax optimization, whatever their nature. It is targeted, as it applies only to the wealthiest taxpayers, and only to those among them who engage in tax avoidance."
💡 "One of the most promising avenues is to introduce a minimum tax for the ultra-rich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth."Seven Nobel laureates in economics advocate for the Zucman tax in their latest op-ed.Read the full @lemonde.fr article 👇www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...
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— EU Tax Observatory (@taxobservatory.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 8:05 AM
The anticipated impact would be significant. As the op-ed highlights: "Globally, a 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals. In Europe, around $50 billion could be raised. And by extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly."
That's according to a June 2024 report that French economist and E.U. Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman prepared for the Group of 20's Brazilian presidency—which was followed by G20 leaders' November commitment to taxing the rich and last month's related proposal from the governments of Brazil, South Africa, and Spain.
"The international movement is underway," the economists declared Monday, also pointing to recent developments on the "Zucman tax" in France. The French National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, in February—but the Senate rejected the measure last month.
The economists urged the European country to keep working at it, writing that "at a time of ballooning public deficits and exploding extreme wealth, the French government must seize the initiative approved by the National Assembly. There is no reason to wait for an international agreement to be finalized—on the contrary, France should lead by example, as it has done in the past," when it was the first country to introduce a value-added tax (VAT).
"As for the risk of tax exile, the bill passed by the National Assembly provides that taxpayers would remain subject to the minimum tax for five years after leaving the country," they wrote. "The government could go further and propose extending this period to 10 years, which would likely reduce the risk of expatriation even more."
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'Indefensible': Trump Budget Law Subsidizes Private Jet Owners While Taking Healthcare From Millions
A provision of the budget law that President Donald Trump signed last week will leave taxpayers to "pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
Jul 07, 2025
The Republican budget measure that U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law late last week contains a provision that analysts say will allow private jet owners to write off the full cost of their aircraft in the first year of purchase, a boon to the ultra-rich that comes as millions of people are set to lose healthcare under the same legislation.
FlyUSA, a private aviation provider, gushed in a blog post that with final passage of the unpopular budget reconciliation package, "business jet ownership has never looked more fiscally attractive or more fun to explain to your accountant."
The law, crafted by congressional Republicans and approved with only GOP support, permanently restores a major corporate tax break known as 100% bonus depreciation, which allows businesses to deduct the costs of certain assets in the first year of purchase rather than writing them off over time.
Forbes noted that the bonus depreciation policy "applies to a slew of qualified, physical business expenses which depreciate over time, such as machinery and company cars, but the policy is often associated with big-ticket luxury items, such as private aircraft, and its institution last decade led to a boom in jet sales."
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class."
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, called bonus depreciation "a massive tax break for billionaires and centi-millionaires that use the most polluting form of transportation on the planet."
"A corporation purchasing a $50 million private jet could potentially deduct the entire $50 million from their taxes in the year of the purchase, rather than spreading the deduction over many years," Collins wrote. "This amounts to a massive taxpayer subsidy, as ordinary taxpayers pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
"Subsidizing more private jets on a warming planet is reckless and indefensible," he added.
The National Business Aviation Association, a lobbying group for the private aviation industry, celebrated passage of the Republican legislation, specifically welcoming the bonus depreciation policy as "effective for incentivizing aircraft purchase." (The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy argues that "depreciation tax breaks have never been shown to encourage more capital investment.")
Meanwhile, communities across the United States are bracing for the law's deep cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, which are expected to impose damaging strains on state budgets and strip food benefits and health coverage from millions of low-income Americans.
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class," said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. "This is certainly one of the cruelest bills in American history, backtracking on the country's painfully slow history of expanding healthcare coverage and, equally remarkably, taking food away from the hungry."
"That's a lot of needless suffering just to make the richest Americans richer," he added.
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