Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" Exposes the GOP Not as the Party of the Average Joe but the Filthy Rich

But, as GOP Senator Joni Ernst would say, we're all going to die anyway, so why care?

Jun 01, 2025

G. Elliott Morris shared the chart below on Substack a couple weeks ago. Derived from the Wharton Budget Model, it shows the change in household income by income level that will result from the recently passed Republican House budget bill, which is officially known as the (I kid you not) “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” This chart isn’t scaled by percentage; if you did that, you’d notice income levels for the highest 10% of income-earners in the United States only rise between 1-4% while income levels for the lowest 10% of income-earners only drop between 2-4%. That may seem insignificant, but a 2-4% drop in income for someone making at most $32,000 a year (a maximum $640-$1280) can leave those earners in a pinch, while a 2-4% increase for someone making at least $170,000 a year (a minimum $3,400-$6,800) is a nice little bonus. To put that in perspective, Morris scaled the chart by raw dollar amount so we can get a sense for how much money the Republican bill will either put in or take out of Americans’ pockets based on their income level:

Here’s the same chart fit to your computer screen:

The cuts to the lowest income-earners are the result of new work requirements and administrative changes connected to Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps) that will make it harder for poor Americans to get food and health care assistance. Those cuts are being used to only partially offset the tax cuts Republicans are handing out to the wealthiest taxpayers, which means that even after the government transfers all that wealth from the least financially well-off to the most well-to-do, the government doesn’t try to make it up to the poor but instead continues to shower the rich in money the Treasury doesn’t have. As Morris, who tries to avoid partisan squabbling on Substack, writes, “This is the clearest case in a generation where the GOP is putting the wealth of the rich ahead of the needs of the poor.”

The effect of this one big beautiful bill is deeper inequality. Its cause is pure greed.

Although this bill is expected to leave 7-10 million people without health care, eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy and electric vehicle incentives, eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in education funding (most of which will come from student loan programs), cut nutritional benefits by 30%, and add roughly $4 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years (or $5 trillion if you factor in extra military and border security spending) (my sources are here and here) one could argue this legislation will ultimately benefit the country. White House economists expect their beautiful bill will result in a 4.2%-5.2% growth in GDP in the short run and boost wages by between $6,000-$11,000 per worker. That sort of economic stimulus could justify the act.

The problem is the White House’s projections aren’t anywhere close to what mainstream economic analysts are predicting for the bill. For example, after incorporating the legislation into their models, the center-right Tax Foundation pegs long-term GDP growth at 0.6%. The Penn-Wharton Budget Model calculates the bill will result in 0.5% growth in GDP over the next ten years, but only if Trump’s draconian tariff agenda doesn’t go into effect. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates annual GDP growth will increase by a microscopic 0.03%.

None of this should be surprising, since Republicans are basically using this bill to make Trump’s 2017 personal and corporate tax cuts permanent. That 2017 bill did little to stimulate the economy. By 2019, wage growth had stalled (it only started growing again thanks to the pandemic) and the economy was behaving as though nothing had happened. The rich definitely got richer as a result of that 2017 bill, however, as corporations used most of their savings on stock buybacks to benefit their shareholders. Neither bill is a stimulus package; they’re both giveaways to the mega-rich.

Republicans are trying to cover-up their upward redistribution of wealth by claiming their bill corrects a massive wrong: The exploitation of the taxpayer-funded welfare state by lazy and dishonest freeloaders. Republicans are supposedly tackling the problem of “waste, fraud, and abuse” in Medicaid and SNAP by attaching new work and administrative requirements to those programs. Yet it turns out such provisions don’t really achieve that policy objective. Instead, what they’re really good at doing is purging people who need food and health care assistance from those programs.

Consider Medicaid. Matt Bruenig has an excellent article in the New York Times about what happens when the government places work requirements on Medicaid, a program, by the way, whose purpose is to provide health care to people who have recently lost their employer-backed health care coverage. As Bruenig points out, in an employer-based national health care system, the decision to go with or without health care coverage isn’t typically made by the employee but by the employer, the person who hires and lays-off employees. If you’re on the wrong end of that decision, suddenly you’re without health care even if you weren’t the one who made the decision not to work. Along those same lines, the Republican bill requires Medicaid recipients to work at least 80 hours per month, but again, the number of hours someone works often isn’t up to the worker but the employer. It’s like making Medicaid dependent on watching 80 hours of live NFL games on TV per month. Someone’s ability to do that is going to be highly dependent not on their willingness to watch football, but on whether or not television stations are making 80 hours of live football available for them to watch.

As Bruenig shows, attaching work requirements to Medicaid doesn’t incentivize work. It only removes people from Medicaid rolls. Arkansas tried this in 2018 and found that depriving 18,000 people of Medicaid did not lower unemployment in the state. That shouldn’t be surprising because, as this chart shows, only a small number of people on Medicaid (3%) are long-term unemployed; the rest are either children, people over the age of 65, disabled, working, or on the verge of either working or getting health care coverage:

Chloe East reached similar conclusions when she looked at SNAP benefits: Work requirements hurt individuals who can’t find work (i.e., those who live in economically depressed areas), can’t find enough work to satisfy the monthly hourly requirements, or struggle to complete the administrative requirements.

In fact, as Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan explain in the New York Times, these administrative requirements are how Republicans have taken to cutting Medicaid without really cutting it. Rather than directly slash Medicaid funding, Republicans—again, in an effort to combat the eternally unpopular forces of “waste, fraud, and abuse”—have instead made applying for and renewing Medicaid cumbersome. This reverses a trend that began with the passage of Obamacare, which made it easier for people to apply for health care, which in turn expanded the number of people with health care coverage. Now, if past is prologue, rolling back Biden-era rules that streamlined the application process and expecting Medicaid recipients to (for example) pointlessly renew their coverage twice rather than once a year will result in millions of people going without health care insurance. Rather than cutting red tape, Republicans instead intend to bury the neediest Americans beneath it.

Do Republicans care that their beautiful bill will make it harder if not impossible for millions of Americans to get health care? I don’t think it troubles them too much. Last Friday, attendees at a town hall meeting grew impatient with Iowa Senator Joni Ernst as she rambled on about how her party’s bill would remove “ineligible” recipients from Medicaid’s rolls. (This is how it always is with the GOP these days: Any evidence of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” no matter how minor or infrequent, demands a total crackdown, and it doesn’t matter if the cure generates worse outcomes than the problem. For instance, Republicans don’t mind making it harder for thousands of people to vote in order to stomp out voter fraud, which is virtually non-existent.) When an audience member shouted that “people are going to die” as a result of the bill, Ernst replied, “Well, we all are going to die.”

She’s right, you know. We live, we die. Existence culminates in nothingness. What is the point? Our time here on Earth is ultimately meaningless, yet we cling to insignificant things like money, health care, and seats in the United States Senate. We do this for no reason. We would be better off surrendering to the call of the abyss.

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You can’t really call what Republicans are doing “policymaking.” If they were making policy, their proposals would have some sort of demonstrable connection to stated objectives. If they wanted to stimulate the economy—which, by the way, was doing just fine sans stimulus—they would design policies with stimulative effects rather than policies that have little to no stimulative effects. (Along those same lines, they definitely wouldn’t let the president slap massive tariffs on nearly every good imported into the country, which could crash the economy by jacking up both inflation and unemployment.) If they wanted to crack down on “waste, fraud, and abuse,” not only would they carefully tailor policies to address those problems, but they would also take into account how severe those problems are, so as not to create a bigger problem by tackling a relatively small problem. If they wanted to reduce the deficit, they would pass laws that did just that rather than laws that explode the debt by trillions of dollars.

At best, you could say there are some Republican lawmakers who have convinced themselves this latest round of supply-side economics really will generate that miraculous 5% growth in GDP the White House is promising. They’ve seen two dots, and someone has convinced them those two dots should be connected, so they’ve gone ahead and connected them, even though those two dots are on different pages of the coloring book.

That’s the charitable explanation. Instead, what Republicans are doing is facilitating a cash grab for the filthy rich, and doing so at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Republicans and the millionaires they serve have two math problems they can’t wish away. First, they don’t have a large enough majority in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and overhaul the entire budget, so that forces them into the reconciliation process. That creates the second problem, which is that the reconciliation process comes with rules that limit their ability to overhaul the budget, meaning they’ve got to get clever with their accounting and offset their tax cuts with spending cuts somewhere else.

Republicans could just let those tax cuts expire or redesign them so that the financial burden is borne by those who can most afford it. Instead, Republicans are taking benefits away from the poor so that the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans aren’t separated from $380,000 they could get by fine without. On top of that, they’re not selling this to the American people by arguing the rich need that money (my guess is most Americans think the rich could spare that money, and more); instead, they’re obscuring their sleight of hand by leaning into the knee-jerk idea that government is corrupt and that those who receive government assistance are lazy and dishonest. Republicans want working class Americans to believe their beautiful bill is about keeping taxpayer money out of the hands of the undeserving poor when it’s actually legislation designed to pad the bank accounts of the super rich.

This bill is motivated by greed, plain and simple. It’s not about the greater economic good. It doesn’t matter that it leaves the poor worse off, or that the party that needed to be empowered to enact it could care less about democracy. All that matters is that the rich get richer.

There’s been a lot of talk these past ten years about the Republican Party’s populist turn and how Trump has transformed the GOP into the party of the working man. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” should shatter that notion. The one major piece of legislation Trump and his minions in Congress are pushing hard to complete would screw over the bottom 40% of income-earners, hand the median income-earner the equivalent of a consolation prize, and transfer boatloads of cash to millionaires and billionaires. Trump may sound like a populist, but that’s just the demagoguery talking. If you want to find the people Trump really cares about, just follow the money.

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Reason to Believe

Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" Exposes the GOP Not as the Party of the Average Joe but the Filthy Rich

But, as GOP Senator Joni Ernst would say, we're all going to die anyway, so why care?

Signals and Noise

From Substack:

From The Atlantic:

From the New York Times:

From the Washington Post:

From ProPublica:

From Vox:

From Politico:

From Doomsday Scenario:

From CNN:

Exit Music: “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley (1969)