One year ago, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans forced their Big Beautiful Bill through Congress. Today, it is one of the most unpopular major laws in recent history.
Joshua Miller
The design of the bill was simple. It gave millionaires, billionaires and corporations massive tax cuts and paid for them on the backs of working Americans.
Major corporate beneficiaries received tens of billions of dollars in tax benefits, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The wealthiest Americans received tax breaks worth tens of thousands of dollars annually. Meanwhile, working families were handed the bill through deep cuts to healthcare and food assistance, higher costs and trillions of dollars added to the national debt.
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Republicans eventually tried to rebrand the law as the “Working Families Tax Cuts.” One year later, working families are beginning to see what the law actually does.
It has increased healthcare costs while cutting Medicaid. It has made it harder for struggling families to afford groceries by imposing restrictions on food assistance. It has shifted enormous costs onto states, hospitals, communities and families.
If you listen to the debate over affordability, you’d think the Working Families Tax Cuts failed. Critics point to today’s cost-of-living challenges as proof they aren't working.
The Congressional Budget Office put numbers to this upside-down bargain. When the law’s tax and spending changes are considered together, low-income households lose $1,200 a year, while high-income households gain $13,600.
That is not a working families tax cut. It is a redistribution of resources upward. It is a reverse Robin Hood.
The consequences are already reaching far beyond a family’s tax return. Republicans cut $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, threatening health coverage for millions of Americans and destabilizing hospitals and healthcare providers that were already struggling to keep their doors open. Public Citizen researchers identified 446 hospitals at heightened risk of closing or cutting services as Medicaid funding shrinks.
Together, those hospitals serve about 7 million patients and employ 250,000 direct care workers. When a hospital cuts maternity care, closes an emergency room or disappears from a rural community, every family in that community pays the price.
And the corporations that benefited from the law have hardly returned the favor. Major corporations that received billions in tax benefits have since cut nearly 45,000 jobs, according to the analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and public layoff announcements.
These are the same kinds of corporations that spent millions lobbying for a law that delivered enormous benefits to corporate America. They got their tax cuts. Workers got pink slips. Calling that a “Working Families Tax Cuts” does not change who won and who lost.
One year later, the American people are seeing the law for what it is. Corporations and the wealthiest Americans got the benefits. Working families got the bill.
