As the Senate debates the latest iteration of Donald Trump’s massive reconciliation package, the latest report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms that the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” is, in fact, a massive giveaway to the rich, at the expense of the poor.
According to a CBO report released on Thursday, over the next ten years around 80 percent of the benefits provided by Republicans’ budget bill will go to the richest ten percent of American households — and households in the lowest 30 percent of incomes are projected to collectively lose billions.
The poorest 10 percent of American households would see their income decrease by about $1,600 per year in annual income, while households with mid-range incomes would only net a few hundred dollars.
The Trump tax bill would be a massive wealth transfer to the already wealthy. It will also strip millions of low-income Americans of their health care coverage through Medicaid over the next decade, and make it more difficult for poor families to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food aid.
“The agency estimates that in general, resources would decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the middle and top of the income distribution,” the CBO wrote.
“Federal and state in-kind benefits would decrease household resources by $1.0 trillion,” the CBO added. “Primarily because federal spending on benefits provided through Medicaid and SNAP would be lower. Changes to program benefits that states made in response to changes in federal policy would also reduce household resources.”
Reviewing the CBO report, Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote that the Trump tax bill will make the bottom 30 percent “worse off” while disproportionately benefiting the top 10 percent of households. “This is not shared sacrifice — it’s a fiscal transfer from the bottom to the top,” he wrote.
Instead of recalibrating the legislation, Republicans in Congress are just insisting that the CBO is wrong.
In a video released on social media, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) noted that the CBO t said Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “would increase a deficit and the debt by trillions of dollars.”
“Well, what happened?” he continued. “They were wrong. Now this is not surprising. They were wrong on the Mellon tax cuts in the 1930s, they were wrong on the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s, they were wrong on the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s. When have they been right?”
The CBO was not wrong about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which increased the federal deficit by almost $2 billion.
Scott was also deeply wrong about the historic estimates made by the CBO, namely because the agency did not exist before 1974 — so it would not have been able to provide estimates regarding the impact of the Melton tax cuts or the Kennedy tax cuts.
Republicans are robbing the poor to give tax cuts to the rich, while blowing up the deficit — and their best defense is to apparently pretend that is not exactly what they’re doing.
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