Robbing the poor to give to the rich

Trump’s "Big Beautiful Bill" is an astoundingly brazen attack on his voters

The Republicans now depend on working-class voters to win elections. But judging by the legislation that Trump is pushing through Congress, you’d think they don’t know it. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” barreling through the Senate and potentially headed to the House before a July 4 deadline, is an audacious act of class warfare that casts Trump as the reverse Robin Hood. He steals from the poor to give to the rich — then asks for his victims’ votes, distracting them with shiny objects from the culture-wars toolbox.

The legislation, a Trumpily branded budget bill, makes the 2017 tax cuts permanent, raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and boosts defense, border, and energy spending — while cutting entitlements, food stamps, and key tax credits for low-income Americans. It includes temporary tax breaks for tips and overtime (and a pause on AI regulation, likely to cost jobs). And it’s expected to add over $3.8 trillion to the deficit.

Incredibly, the plan offers an average $68,000 annual tax break to Americans earning over $900,000 a year, according to modeling by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. It pays for this, in part, with nearly $800 billion in Medicaid cuts and reductions to the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit — lifelines for the working class.

To justify this upward redistribution, Trump has been throwing around the utterly misleading figure of a “68% tax increase” if the bill doesn’t pass. That is classic Trump bullshit — the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether he is an ignoramus or assumes his listeners are (my guess is a combination of the two): That number refers not to a tax rate but to the percentage of households that might see any increase if the 2017 tax cuts expire next year. Most of those increases would be small, and the hit would be on higher-income brackets. But the lie is doing its job: it provides rhetorical cover for a policy that overwhelmingly benefits those who need help the least.

Meanwhile, the real consequences will be borne by those affected by lost health coverage, rising inequality, and vanishing benefits. This bill repeals or restricts almost every clean energy credit introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act. It favors legacy industries and entrenched capital. Its climate provisions are not just backward — they’re utterly hostile to the effort to save the environment, the earth and the oceans from degradation.

How can it be that most working-class people in America voted for this attack on themselves? Note the below finding from Pew: Most of them didn’t know it. An amazing 75% of Trump voters thought his policies would “make things better for poor people.”

So let’s just say that there’s a lotta confusion out there.

Of course, Trump was also able to exploit the very real anger many Americans feel about woke excesses and illegal immigration — problems that tied the Democrats up in knots. But it’s far from clear that they made a conscious choice to pay quite so high a price for satisfaction on those issues. Indeed, many Trump voters said they were bothered by inflation. For their trouble they received the inflation-boosters known as tariffs and mass deportations. Tariffs function as a hidden tax, raising prices on everything from clothing to electronics to groceries. Meanwhile, aggressive deportation policies threaten to constrict the low-wage labor supply, particularly in agriculture, construction, and service sectors, driving up labor costs that are ultimately passed on to consumers. Now they will have even less money to pay for the more expensive things.

It’s deeply pitiful that in a moment of such glaring economic injustice, the Democratic bench offers no national figure capable of channeling working-class anger. The party is led either by aging establishment caretakers who exude no charisma or urgency, or by progressives whose commitment to polarizing cultural causes alienates the very people they claim to fight for.

Into that vacuum comes Zohran Mamdani, who just won a high-profile Democratic primary in New York by running on the kind of economic populism that addresses people’s infuriating reality: crushing costs and stagnant wages while Jeff Bezos rents out Venice. If Mamdani — or someone like him — dropped the culture war baggage entirely and made the full case against Republican economic policy, it could be transformative. Voters are hungry for a leader who names the theft, calls out the betrayal, and offers a moral and material alternative.

I’m normally a centrist, and certainly not a left-wing populist. I know capitalism can work well when it is not rapacious, and it has lifted billions out of poverty. But what the Republicans are doing right now is highway robbery and it calls for a response. It’s a fundamental rejection of the postwar social democratic consensus — the idea that capitalism, to be sustainable, must include guardrails. That the market must be complemented by a state that invests in people and reins in excess.

This consensus gave us the New Deal, the GI Bill, Medicare, public education, and progressive taxation. It was not socialist. It was the reason Western capitalism survived the 20th century. In the United States, it was launched in earnest with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, establishing a federal income tax. Even Republican icons like Theodore Roosevelt supported it as a way to balance opportunity with responsibility. Franklin Roosevelt expanded it during the Depression, not to punish wealth but to prevent the chaos that comes when most people feel screwed over.

But over the last 40 years, the American right has chipped away at that legacy — championing so-called “trickle-down economics,” the idea that cutting taxes for the rich would spur investment, growth, and prosperity for all. That theory is now completely discredited. It has produced massive deficits, rising inequality, stagnant wages, and a sense of betrayal that fuels political extremism. There is no serious economist who still believes that slashing taxes on billionaires will lift up the working class. Yet that’s exactly what Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” attempts to do, again.

Even under the best-case projections, this legislation will add over $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Wealth per person could decline.

On Monday, the Senate began an all-day marathon of amendments and procedural votes. With 53 Republican senators and Vice President JD Vance ready to break any tie, the bill is close to passage. From there, it returns to the House, where the Republican margin is narrow but sufficient if party discipline holds. It most definitely should not — but do any Republicans have any decency left? Or evidence of a spine?

A few cracks have appeared. Senator Thom Tillis came out against the bill due to Medicaid concerns and promptly announced he wouldn’t seek reelection. Trump gloated. Elon Musk — hardly a leftist — called the bill “utterly insane” and warned of catastrophic job losses.

But unless more Republicans break ranks, the bill is likely to pass. And if it does, the American people will have been conned yet again — sold “Soak the Woke” slogans while their benefits were stripped, their futures mortgaged, and their country handed lock, stock and barrel to the ultra-rich.

Here’s how bad it already is. The US ranks dead last among developed nations by the Gini coefficient, the most widely used measure of inequality (where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents maximum inequality with one person owning everything). After taxes and transfers, the US posts a Gini coefficient of approximately 0.39—well above all other democracies. The picture is starker when looking at wealth: the top 1% of Americans control about 32–35% of national wealth, according to the Federal Reserve. The OECD finds that the top 10% in the US take home almost 20 times more than the bottom 10% — the worst inequality in the developed world.

The big, beautiful bill is a petty, ugly way to make this even worse.

If the left cannot figure out how to meet that crisis with moral clarity and energy, devising the right policies and elevating leaders who tap the economic pain millions feel, then the right will keep exploiting culture wars to cover up its economic war on ordinary people. And this will not end well.