As I write this, the House and Senate are rushing to pass what’s become known as “The Big Beautiful Bill.” There’s resistance to even a Senate reading of the nearly 1,000-page piece of legislation. The richest get thousands of dollars in tax breaks, the poor will lose over $1,500 each, and the bill increases the budget deficit by trillions of dollars. But there are solutions.
You can read the Senate version of the bill here.
The bill would extend the tax cuts of 2017, which is where most of the deficit spending comes from. It would be even worse for the deficit, but some in Washington pushed for cutting spending. The problem is that those burdens would fall the hardest upon the poorest Americans, even those who supported the GOP in the last election.
“A new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would increase by 11.8 million the number of people without health insurance in 2034,” write Lisa Mascaro, Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti with the Associated Press. “Top income-earners would see about a $12,000 tax cut under the House bill, while the package would cost the poorest Americans $1,600, the CBO said.”
This hit to the poorest Americans comes from SNAP and Medicaid cuts. It’s dressed up as providing work requirements, but both programs already have this. What the bill does is make it harder on those already working to get the benefits they qualify for, by increasing the amount of paperwork you have to fill out to get them. We shouldn’t be punishing the working poor.
The more Americans learn about the bill, the less they seem to like it. In a special survey of Republicans, this is what Yale researchers found, as reported by Michael Mechanic in Mother Jones. “In our baseline condition, Republican support was around 54 percent and opposition was only 20 percent. When we show them just the tax end, it becomes about equal—47 percent support to 44 percent opposition. But when we show the taxing and spending side, support drops to 23 percent and opposition goes to 61 percent—a three-fold increase in opposition relative to the control—and support drops by over half.”
It's not the only survey that found widespread opposition to HR1. The Kaiser Family Foundation and a slew of polls reported by NBC show how massive numbers of Americans don’t like the bill especially when they learn more about what’s in it. And opponents include white Americans without a college degree. Even Republican legislators who read it find more problems.
Back when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, I found he was able to beat his Republican rivals who called for many of these policies, by defending Medicare and Medicaid against these cuts, something others in the GOP were unwilling to do. It’s how he outflanked his rivals and won the crowded primaries. It had little to nothing to do with the nicknames he used against rivals, as some in the media would have you believe. But now we’re faced with a legislative bill that looks exactly like what Trump once opposed when running for president, and more like that “Project 2025” that Trump publicly disowned during the 2024 campaign. MAGA voters should join Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and have their representatives and senators send this bill back to the drawing board. Here’s how you can reach your legislator (https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials) to tell them to fix the bill before it is too late.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.
