The Seven Ugliest Provisions in Trump's ‘Big Beautiful Bill'

Yahoo

2 days ago

Donald Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' is a reverse-Robin Hood nightmare. It steals from the poor to give to the rich. The 1,038-page version that passed the House will also balloon the deficit by nearly $4 trillion.
The Trump tax bill achieves this feat by extending (and in many cases expanding) tax breaks for the richest Americans, while at the same time depriving more than 10 million Americans of health insurance and regular access to their doctors, by axing $880 billion from Medicaid. It also increases red tape for Obamacare, while allowing other subsidies to lapse, boxing millions more out of their insurance.
The bill is regressive as a matter of tax policy. It will reduce the take-home incomes of bottom 10 percent of income earners by four percent by the end of the decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects. Penn Wharton, Trump's alma mater, finds that most households earning less than $51,000 will immediately see their after-tax income decrease. Meanwhile, the bill boosts the incomes of the top one percent by nearly $70,000 in the first year alone, giving that elite cohort a collective $124 billion net tax cut.
The Trump bill sorta makes good on Trump's campaign sales gimmicks — offering temporary, three-year tax breaks on tips (cost: $40 billion); the extra income earned from overtime ($124 billion); and auto loan interest ($58 billion); while also offering a tax credit to seniors, meant as an offset of taxes on Social Security income ($72 billion).
But as passed by the House, the tax bill also has many ugly provisions. Some are related to taxes, like the abolition of taxes on gun silencers, or ending tax incentives for clean energy and cars. Others are just completely extraneous, like language prohibiting state- and local regulation of artificial intelligence for 10 years.Below is a survey of seven terrible tricks up the sleeves of the Big Beautiful Bill:
1) Undermining the Rule of Law
A provision slipped into the House bill, unrelated to taxes, would have a major impact on the courts and the rule of law. It blocks any funding to enforce contempt of court orders. This, in turn, could enable the Trump administration to flout the rulings of judges without consequence. Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of law as the University of California, is sounding the alarm that this is an affront to the basic functioning of our democracy. He writes in a post at Just Security that 'nothing could be done' to enforce injunctions against the executive branch were this provision to become law — 'even when the government had been found to violate the Constitution.' In fact, he adds, 'the greatest effect of adopting the provision would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.' These concerns are ripe because the Trump administration's countless illegal executive orders and actions keep getting turned back in court, and the administration's compliance — as with falling to 'facilitate' the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the gulag in El Salvador, as directed by the Supreme Court — has been irregular at best.
2) Rewarding Rich Homeowners
Rich people in blue states have cause to laud the Big Beautiful Bill. It quadruples a tax break that one analysis finds 'Overwhelmingly Benefits Wealthy, White Households.' We are talking here about the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. The tax break has some logic. It is intended to keep folks from having to pay federal taxes on the tax dollars they owe to governments closer to home. The 2017 Trump tax bill limited the deductibility of these payments — once unlimited — to $10,000, to help pay for its sweeping tax cuts for the rich and corporations. That partially preserved a break that's a boon to middle-class homeowners in blue states with high property taxes, including the Northeast or the West Coast, while stripping it from the vacation home and private-school set.
High earners in states from New Jersey to California have since bridled against the SALT deduction limit, arguing it's a form of double taxation, and have won over political allies in both parties. Inside the House GOP, a group of lawmakers calling themselves the 'very salty' five held up the Trump bill until the SALT deduction was boosted to $40,000 and made available to couples earning up to half-a-million dollars a year.
3) A Boondoggle for Private Schools
On the charitable giving side of the tax act, the House Bill creates a back-door subsidy for private school vouchers. Rich people who donate to nonprofits that hand out vouchers to private K-12 schools will now receive not a tax deduction — usually capped at 35 cents off taxes for every one dollar donated — but a tax credit. Every dollar donated is counted as a dollar paid in taxes. This tax credit not only applies to the value of cash donations, but the market value of stocks. In many cases — as outlined here — donors would be able to reap a greater return on their investments by donating stock that has appreciated in value, and reaping the tax benefits, than by selling the investment and then owing capital gains taxes. The value of this incentive is estimated at $23 billion over 10 years, with the administration subsidizing the flight from public education at the same time it aims to eliminate the federal Department of Education.
4) Leave No Heir Behind
No GOP tax bill would be complete without a giveaway to the scions of billionaire families. The Republican Party has long demonized the estate tax as the 'death tax,' inveighing against it as a threat to salt-of-the-earth family farmers. Thanks to Trump's first tax bill, the estate tax exemption currently stands at nearly $27 million for couples, but is due to fall to about half that, absent a change in the law. The 'Big Beautiful Bill' indexes the current exemption to inflation and makes the tax break permanent. A rich couple will be able to pass on $30 million to their descendants without paying a penny of tax next year. According to a letter from Americans for Tax Fairness, 'this handout to lucky heirs and heiresses will cost over $200 billion in lost revenue over 10 years.'
5) Shortchange Kids of Immigrants
A MAGA tax bill needs some anti-immigrant juice. And the Big Beautiful Bill provides that by limiting availability of the child tax credit to only citizen children with a citizen parent. The child tax credit is currently available to children with Social Security numbers, so long as their parents have a taxpayer identification number, given to immigrants who pay taxes. The BBB would increase the value of the credit to $2,500, but require that the parent or parents claiming the credit also have Social Security numbers, as a proxy for citizenship status. The change is expected to disqualify nearly two million citizen children in mixed-status households from this vital government support.
6) No Insurance for You!
One of the most controversial changes in the Big Beautiful Bill is to impose a work requirement on supposedly 'able-bodied' adults to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. The requirement is spelled out as 80 hours a month of work or volunteering. The implementation is left up to states, some of which are committed to expanding health coverage, but others which have long been ideologically opposed. Enrollees must often navigate a maze of forms and bureaucratic hurdles to establish and maintain eligibility — even before this new work requirement — because Medicaid contains strict income caps. Recipients must prove they are, in fact, poor. The Big Beautiful Bill however adds insult to injury. People who are kicked off Medicaid by failing to navigate the requirements around work and work-reporting, will be punished by becoming ineligible for subsidies for individual insurance plans sold under Obamacare. By design, the Trumpy Medicaid changes will eliminate coverage for 10.3 million people, according to the CBO.
7) Work for Your Supper
Work requirements are fetishized throughout the Big Beautiful Bill, and also apply to recipients of SNAP, the acronym for the federal food assistance program. As passed, the House bill would expand work requirements in SNAP on adults up to the age of 65. (Current work requirements phase out at 55). It would also require parents with children as young as eight to work outside the house, turning another generation of young poor children into latchkey kids. According to modeling by the Urban league, the Big Beautiful Bill — which so richly rewards billionaires and their heirs — would be financed in part by taking food out of the mouths of hungry families. As many as 2.7 million households would lose food benefits, with the average blow to the family grocery budget totaling $254 a month.
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