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An acute observer of US politics recently noted that Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” might be better described as a big beautiful meat cleaver, dripping with blood. The bill — which finally passed an evenly divided US Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote; got through the House with more arm-twisting of Republican holdouts; and was signed into law by Trump — will, in fact, cleave the country in two, although not in equal parts. 

Income distribution in the United States is already dangerously skewed. The BBB will make it worse. The top 20 percent of earners in the country already receive more than 50 percent of the annual US payroll. The remaining 80 percent of Americans get to fight over the scraps that remain. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill can be expected to increase income — and wealth — inequality like a shot of steroids. 

The Anti-Solution to Wealth Inequality

The direct impact of Trump’s bill is to lower federal taxation in a way that skews dramatically in favor of the wealthy. Trump hopes to make up for the loss in federal revenue by relying on tariffs rather than federal taxes to finance government services. This shift of revenue source carries major implications for both the distribution of the federal tax burden and the distribution of income and wealth in the US.

The graduated income tax allocates the lion’s share of financing government services to the wealthiest segment of society and asks those farther down the economic ladder to pay a lesser share. That principle is a sound one and one that has worked well for over a century. The degree of graduation has varied, from very steep in the years following World War II to  progressively shallower in the roughly half century since the Reagan years. 

Trump’s BBB shifts the tax burden still further down the economic scale, and, especially in a time of out-of-control income and wealth inequality, it is hard to see how that is sound at all. Apart from the sheer cruelty of it, it makes little or no macroeconomic sense to impose relatively higher income tax burdens on those at the ladder’s bottom who can barely make ends meet.

Tariffs are essentially a sales tax that funnels money into government coffers but places the cost equally on everyone, whether rich or poor. Equality sounds fair but the problem with this approach is that the rich have the money to pay. A few thousand dollars in extra costs means nothing to a billionaire, or even a lowly millionaire, but that same amount looms large in the budgets of those less well-off. When it comes to the poor, the added cost can mean perpetual economic slavery or unending indebtedness from paycheck to paycheck. 

Tariffs do eventually produce money that can finance government services. The question is: How much? The difference between tariffs and taxing income is that everything will suddenly cost more as the government sucks money from your wallet at the cash register for literally everything you buy. 

Trump’s bill is expected to raise the national debt to a level at which we are paying so much interest on loans to the government that little if anything will be left over to spend on government services and programs. Trump doesn’t care. He knows that he will probably be dead by then.

Elon Musk’s frenetic effort to slash and burn both government services and institutions was a desperate attempt to cut the cost of government to a point at which tariffs could reasonably fund it. Musk failed. 

When he was unable to produce the expected spending cuts, the administration simply changed its accounting system so that a forecast $4 trillion surge in the national debt was magically presented as a mere $400 billion increase in debt. 

Trump has never been a fan of logic or reality. But smoke and mirrors aside, eventually we all have to face reality. Trump’s bill is expected to raise the national debt to a level at which we are paying so much interest on loans to the government that little if anything will be left over to spend on government services and programs. Trump doesn’t care. He knows that he will probably be dead by then. 

With the Big Beautiful Bill now the law of the land, the top 10–20 percent of Americans, whose households earn at least $200,000 a year, should still do perfectly fine — although a lot depends on where you live. That $200,000 buys a great deal in Idaho — it barely gets by in New York or California. In Philadelphia, sanitation workers and airport baggage handlers have gone on strike, protesting that they can’t afford to live in the city that hired them. 

On a larger scale, the 14.4 percent of American households earning more than $200,000 a year accounts for an even smaller slice of the total US population. That said, roughly 25.6 percent of the households currently living in Washington, DC, earn more than $200,000 a year, and politicians living there do even better. The estimated net worth of each of the wealthiest 50 members of the US House and Senate ranges from over $10 million to $360 million. 

It’s easy to see why Washington politicians — particularly MAGA Republicans — have less reason to be concerned about the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill than someone in Missouri or Texas struggling to make ends meet. 

Add to this already privileged group a bunch of corporate CEOs who have awarded themselves multimillion-dollar salaries, and a much smaller but more influential group of billionaires who have more money than they know what to do with, and it’s safe to say that this selective slice of the population can easily believe that Trump’s bill really is beautiful — even if denying people medical coverage or poor kids hot lunches might seem fundamentally wicked and anti-human. 

The other part of the American population, the 80 percent who are not in the privileged 20 percent, are being left to fend for themselves. The problem is that if you live in West Virginia, Kentucky, or Oklahoma, less than 7 percent of the state’s households earn more than $200,000. In Mississippi, it’s 5.3 percent — one out of 20 families. The median household income for the whole country is a little more than $80,000 a year. That counts on two people working. The median personal income — one person working — is around $42,000.

As Trump Republicans see it, the financial losers in this game aren’t really helping the country. They are simply along for the ride and getting in the way of Making America Great Again.

As for individuals, if you are at the dividing line between rich and poor, making, say, $70,000 a year, this can be a pretty scary proposition. A slight slip-up, a misunderstood joke, an unconscious frown when your boss is looking, and you could be on the downward spiral to the lost and forgotten. The middle class is disappearing fast, and most of that class is not headed upward. 

Dystopian Truth Meets Dystopian Fiction

The novelist Paul Theroux painted a graphic picture of where accelerating inequality is taking us in his 1986 science fiction novel, O-Zone. In Theroux’s imagined account, full-fledged citizens — that is, those who have a lot of money — live in giant towers and are known as “owners.” They use helicopters to flit from building to building. The outside world, the street level, is no man’s land. Anyone walking on the ground is considered an alien with no civic identity, basically a “thing.” You can shoot them without consequences, if that tickles your fantasy. 

Missouri, briefly barred from human habitation by a nuclear disaster, has become a national wilderness park, a memory of what America used to be. It’s called the O-Zone, and offers a favorite getaway for owners. When a group of friends visit the park, they discover people who are not owners, and to their amazement, they realize that these people are actual human beings, not simply alien things. 

Trump clearly wants to change America fast. The US Constitution, the rule of law, and a judiciary that may still be looking out for the country’s interests are all impediments to Trump’s vision of the future. The Big Beautiful Bill is Trump’s vehicle for implementing immediate change. 

The description appeared far-fetched when Theroux wrote it. A few months into the unrestrained Trump administration — and especially after watching Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk at Trump’s inauguration — it looks considerably less so. It is noteworthy that members of Congress were relegated to the rear of the room so that corporate CEOs and a handful of other billionaires could capture the spotlight.  

A Political Blitzkrieg

Trump clearly wants to change America fast. The US Constitution, the rule of law, and a judiciary that may still be looking out for the country’s interests are all impediments to Trump’s vision of the future. The Big Beautiful Bill is Trump’s vehicle for implementing immediate change. 

The conventional view is that the role of government is to provide services for its citizens. Remember that old line, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”? It sounded pretty good when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it in 1863. It still does. The question, though, is: What people is it referring to?

Trump’s vision is government by the right people, for the right people. Wealthy people — the right kind of people — don’t need Medicaid, poverty assistance, school lunches, or anything else that we expect governments to provide; so why bother with government at all? 

The underlying problem, as Trump sees it, is that government costs money, and someone eventually has to pay for it. When the US economy collapsed in 1929, leading to the Great Depression, the country looked very much as though it was caught in a death spiral. The solution back then was the graduated income tax — authorized by the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913 — which provided the government with the resources to stabilize the crumbling system. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, though himself a patrician, argued that those people — especially the so-called robber barons, who had made enormous profits in the decades before the 1929 stock market crash — should contribute more to rebuilding the country than those whose lives had been upended by the crash and subsequent nationwide depression. 

Roosevelt called his plan the “New Deal.” He reasoned that if you are enjoying what America produces, you have a responsibility to contribute to the system. If you don’t like taxes, there’s an alternative: philanthropy. Those preferring to target their contributions could use tax-deductible donations to specified charities and not-for-profit entities to reduce the income tax owed.

The robber barons hated the New Deal, but the system worked until a few “dark money billionaires” decided to direct their “philanthropy” towards convincing the public to leave the poor billionaires alone. The result was the creation of a number of right-wing pseudo–think tanks, including the American Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). These groups could advertise themselves as not-for-profit, and to a certain extent, they were. Their real purpose was not to gain profit; it was to gain political influence. 

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is icing on the cake.

Government of the Many for the Few Calls for Military Muscle 

As mentioned earlier, governments finance themselves through two primary means: taxes and tariffs. For several reasons, tariffs are less predictable than taxes. 

A major reason is that starting a trade war, as Trump has done, can prove not only disruptive but extremely expensive. The tariffs, if pushed too far, alienate foreign markets, and, once offended, foreign governments begin to retaliate. The cost climbs dramatically, and the flow of income into government coffers becomes unpredictable. 

The US learned this when the administration of President Herbert Hoover imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs following the crash of 1929. More than a thousand US economists pleaded with Hoover not to impose the tariffs. Like Trump, Hoover refused to listen. The worldwide tariff war that he initiated in the hopes of reviving American business helped turn the Great Depression into a global disaster. 

Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was intended to reduce government spending enough to let Trump’s new tariffs pay the bill without having to raise the national debt so much that interest on government loans became unacceptably high. It didn’t work. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill calls for spending an unprecedented $175 billion on cutting off foreign immigration into the US. Add to that another $45 billion to build new “detention facilities,” a euphemism for concentration camps, and another $30 billion for ICE reinforcements — think Gestapo. 

ICE is already so unpopular, and widely viewed as an enemy occupying power, that its agents have taken to wearing face masks when making arrests or hurling protesters to the ground. As for the $45 billion for Trump’s “Alligator Alcatrazes,” the current budget for the Bureau of Prisons is only $8 billion, and likewise, ICE’s current budget is around $8 billion. 

Not since the Big Beautiful Bill passed. It’s easy to see why a meat cleaver dripping blood may be a better image for the whole thing. 

Going Along, Knowing Better: The Fear Factor

A number of clueless and/or frightened Republican senators and representatives nevertheless signed on to the Big Beautiful scam, arguing that limiting Medicaid spending throughout the country would cut enough government spending to make the whole thing work. Their argument was that anyone getting government medical help should be working at least 20 hours a week. No one explained why someone who is sick and possibly at death’s door should suddenly be required to go job hunting before seeing a doctor. 

The fact is that roughly 90 percent of the people who depend on Medicaid are already working — they just can’t earn enough money to both pay for a doctor’s visit and put food on the table. The Big Beautiful Bill’s solution is to ensnare them in so much incomprehensible red tape that they’ll simply give up and die rather than fight the Kafkaesque mess that Trump is trying to sell them. 

Before Trump’s MAGA crowd took over, the US was considered a world leader in science, technology, and innovation. The most qualified students and graduates flooded into the country from all over the planet, to learn how to get things done. Not anymore. 

But it isn’t only the poor who benefit from Medicaid. It’s also the medical establishment — the doctors, nurses, and hospital workers who provide the urgent and emergency care needed to keep the country functioning. 

If you live in New York City, you probably have no difficulty finding a hospital that’s a subway ride away. If you live in Idaho, Nebraska, or Montana, driving 200 miles to reach a hospital when you may be seriously ill or even dying, and are poor to boot, is no joke, especially when you find that the hospital has been closed because of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. 

Before Trump’s MAGA crowd took over, the US was considered a world leader in science, technology, and innovation. The most qualified students and graduates flooded into the country from all over the planet, to learn how to get things done. Not anymore. That leadership role has now switched to China. Not because they outsmarted us, but because Trump threw our advantage away. 

The fact is that we need government services if we want the country to move forward and prosper. We need public education if we want a competitive workforce. We need medical research if we don’t want to die in agony from some disease that might have been prevented or successfully treated if Trump hadn’t dreamed up his Big Beautiful Bill. The truth is beginning to dawn on even the densest Republican lawmakers. It took a tie-breaking vote by Trump-lickspittle VP Vance to shoehorn the bill through a troubled US Senate and some serious presidential arm-twisting to get the slim GOP House majority to follow suit. 

Ignorance Is Their Mission

Trump’s reaction to the glaring flaws in his approach has been to obscure the facts and to try to blind us to reality. When there’s money to be made, what else can possibly matter? He hopes to garner big contributions from oil company CEOs who are anything but optimistic about their future, given the mounting costs of climate change. 

To divert us from the dangers of fossil fuel production and consumption in cars and buildings, his zombie-like minions order the military to stop exchanging satellite data with government weather organizations. A Category 5 hurricane is approaching your state — the military won’t tell you because you might link the impending catastrophe to climate change. As Trump sees it, the less we know, the better. Yet ignorance has a price, and the Big Beautiful Bill has a particularly high price when it comes to making America function. 

Again, if there’s money to be made, what else can possibly matter? Certainly not the well-being of the country as a whole.

What we are seeing now is a division of economic classes accelerated by climate change and eventually by artificial intelligence, which will certainly destroy thousands, maybe millions of jobs, because AI algorithms will replace a wide range of functions now performed by human beings. It won’t matter if the AI isn’t really that intelligent. It’s a one-time cost and a cheaper solution for a short-sighted CEO. 

Again, if there’s money to be made, what else can possibly matter? Certainly not the well-being of the country as a whole. 

When AT&T’s Bell Labs — once arguably the leading research facility in the country — reshaped itself as Lucent Technologies in 1996, the company’s CEO decided to fire 20,000 employees. I was working in New York at the time, and I called Lucent to ask whether the CEO had considered the social consequences of suddenly leaving that many people in a close-knit community without a job. “Not my problem,” he said. 

But if it isn’t his problem, whose problem is it? It is the government’s, of course, yet Trump and his wholly owned party are doing everything they can to starve and cripple the government that we depend on for our own survival. Except, of course, when it comes to surveilling, arresting, disappearing those who irk the regime or have the poor judgment to get in its way. 

Adios, America!

The problems of the 1990s look like nothing compared to what’s coming our way now. For debate’s sake, let’s say that the Republicans succeed and the wealthy have all the goodies they want while the rest of the country makes do with their leftovers. What would be the effect? 

With no money to buy anything, there would be no market for manufactured goods. The wealthy could live in their gated communities protected by armed guards, but what would they find once they stepped outside their safe zone? 

I previewed the answer to that question during a visit to Calcutta in the 1960s. I saw thousands of people sleeping on sidewalks and others literally starving, while a few would-be maharajas separated themselves from the masses so they could continue to live in the style they imagined they deserved. Except that the style was totally detached from anything resembling civilization. Each store had a guard with a shotgun standing in front. Police stations were surrounded by sandbags and barbed wire. 

Greece experienced a situation similar to what America now faces during the global financial crisis of 2009. The crisis actually could be traced to American banks, which, under the Bush administration, had provided easy-term loans to people who could never afford to repay them. The banks didn’t care; they pocketed the fees from issuing the loans and then bundled the risky obligations into “securities” and sold them to buyers who believed the hype. Eventually, the overhyped house of cards collapsed. 

In the end, it didn’t matter who was responsible for the disaster. Greece rapidly descended from an advanced European economy to the level of a third-world, emerging-market economy. The wealthy had been so successful in evading taxes that the whole system imploded. 

Greece quickly found it impossible to borrow enough money to stay afloat. There followed more than a decade of austerity and suffering. The wealthy few lamented the destruction of their country and then went on to vacation elsewhere. It was not exactly a high point in the history of a country once admired as the birthplace of Western civilization — yet that is exactly what Trump is trying to impose here. 

What will happen now that Trump has managed to push the Big Beautiful Bill past the final parliamentary hurdles that were created to protect us from such power grabs? 

The answer will likely be another avoidable tragedy of immense proportions. Donald Trump will have earned his place in history, no doubt next to Herbert Hoover, and possibly Benito Mussolini or Spain’s General Francisco Franco, or as a poor man’s Adolf Hitler. 

Some of us will undoubtedly go on vacation somewhere else. But the America we once considered home will not only not be great, it probably won’t even exist.