It’s Top-Down Class War, Stupid
Trump’s billionaire populism has always been a ruse, now the House GOP budget bill exposes the obvious truth—it’s all about redistributing wealth and power upwards
Despite all the noise that came with the flurry of dystopian executive orders, international trade chaos, and the chorus of hate and division, it’s always been about one simple thing: making the rich richer at our expense. The theatre of cruelty and trauma that comes with the Trump circus simply serves to get us to take our eyes off the ball.
As I write this, May gray is indeed heading into June gloom as the dismal May revise of the state budget in California that revealed an even larger than expected deficit which will surely flow downhill to counties and cities was followed in recent days by the catastrophe that is the House budget bill. Predictably Trump’s head fake about taxing the rich to help trim the federal debt turned out to be a mirage since the House GOP passed a measure that doubled down on incompetence and cruelty by giving away the farm to the rich while harming the rest of us. Now, if the bill is passed by the Senate, it’s time to start doling out the cuts and inflicting the suffering.
The reporting in the Guardian put it pithily: “It’s really striking that this bill is both as fiscally irresponsible as it is and regressive,” said Daniel Hornung, Biden’s former deputy director of the National Economic Council and a senior fellow at MIT. “People making less than $50,000 a year will actually see their incomes go down, and it’s really to finance tax cuts for largely high-income people.”
Despite all the bluster from Trump and the White House about how this bill would be a boon for working people, the reality is quite the opposite. Labor writer Steven Greenhouse notes rather than holding up a sign that said “Pro-Worker Priorities” the Trump Administration would have been better served by a “Pro-Billionaire Priorities” banner. Pretty much everyone outside of Mar-a-Lago is getting the short end of the stick:
The Center for American Progress points out that the Trump/Republican budget bill would, if implemented, “be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in US history”. Another progressive thinktank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that the budget bill would cut $1.1tn from food aid, Medicaid and other health programs while lavishing $1.1tn in tax cuts upon those earning over $500,000. Not only that, the 1m households earning over $1m a year would receive $105bn in tax cuts in 2027 – that’s more than the tax cuts going to the 127m households earning under $100,000 . . . Trump boasts he is pro-worker, but he is doing absolutely nothing to help with what many workers say are their biggest priorities: making housing more affordable, reducing the cost of childcare and healthcare, making it easier to send one’s kids to college, and bringing down prices. Billionaires can rejoice that Trump is capitulating to them and their priorities, but American workers shouldn’t be fooled into believing that Trump is addressing their needs.
Over on his Substack, Robert Reich posted a simple and devastating Q and A about the House budget bill that boils it down to the essentials:
1. Does the House’s “one big beautiful bill” cut Medicare? (Answer: Yes, by an estimated $500 billion.)
2. Because the bill cuts Medicaid, how many Americans are expected to lose Medicaid coverage? (At least 8.6 million.)
3. Will the tax cut in the bill benefit the rich or the poor or everyone?(Overwhelmingly, the rich.)
4. How much will the top 0.1 percent of earners stand to gain from it? (Nearly $390,000 per year).
5. If you figure in the benefit cuts and the tax cuts, will Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 gain or lose? (They’ll lose about $700 a year).
6. How about Americans with incomes less than $17,000? (They’ll lose more than $1,000 per year on average).
7. How much will the bill add to the federal debt? ($3.8 trillion over 10 years.)
8. Who will pay the interest on this extra debt? (All of us, in both our tax payments and higher interest rates for mortgages, car loans, and all other longer-term borrowing.)
9. Who collects this interest? (People who lend to the U.S. government, 70 percent of whom are American and most of whom are wealthy.)
Bonus Round Evil: There Are New Kings in America
Last week over at Words and Deeds Doug Porter did an excellent job of outlining some of the poison pills embedded in the “One Big, Beautiful” bill that Americans will potentially have to swallow, as did the New York Times.
Three things that stand out amongst the litany of evils described in those pieces are the limitations the bill puts on the ability of judges to enforce contempt rulings, the effective end to regulation of AI by states for a decade, and a new and innovative form of union busting aimed at federal workers that would “force new federal employees to either give up traditional job protections or take a significant cut to their compensation.” The bottom line: enshrine unbridled political and economic power in the service of unlimited greed and the perpetuation of a deep and disabling inequality. Comfort the perpetually comfortable and afflict the already afflicted in novel and more sinister ways
Welcome to the new Gilded Age where the Robber Barons are just as shameless as those of old but utterly disinterested in building an infrastructure that serves the national interest or even provides the “ladders” for the working class that past elites like Andrew Carnegie fancied came as an ancillary effect of their wealth. Better to create a political reality where, as Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek once suggested, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
In such a society, where the truly powerful seem always out of reach, perhaps even out of sight, the only outlet for people’s anger is each other. Thus, the cycle of grievance never ends, and we live pitted against each other while the billionaire class laughs all the way to the bank.
Indeed, as the New York Times systematically documented yesterday, Trump and the GOP have successfully realigned American politics by “overwhelmingly making gains in working-class counties” across all racial demographics. Hence, despite the overwhelming evidence that nothing in their policy agenda will benefit working class Americans, Trump continues to talk populist while walking billionaire.
Unless Democrats outside of the Bernie/AOC wing of the party can start to more clearly expose this and consistently hammer away at who the real winners and losers really are, Trump will continue the same hustle as working- and middle-class Americans are thrust back into a pre-New Deal world while the rich just keep getting richer.
This is their game, and they are playing for keeps. The question that remains is whether we are willing to accept it or if we fight back. Perhaps we should take a cue from Trump’s new public enemy number one, Bruce Springsteen, who, in “Death to My Hometown” sang, “Send the robber barons straight to hell—the greedy thieves who came and ate the flesh of everything they found. Whose crimes have gone unpunished now, who walk the streets as free men now.”
Time to find the Ghost of Tom Joad.