Elon Musk is right: the massive cash giveaway to the richest at the expense of the poorest that Senate Republicans passed this week is “utterly insane and destructive.”
Average Americans, and soon enough many Republican politicians, will regret the budget bill President Trump and the far-right have cooked up if, as expected, the full Congress passes a final version of the bill into law before the July 4 holiday. The bill will sell out the future of hundreds of millions of working Americans, just to hand Trump and the GOP a short-term political win.
The bogus bill will pile tens of trillions of dollars in new debt on all Americans, especially our young people, while bringing back high inflation and adding costs to average households.
The bill will take health care and revenue away from the lowest income households, while giving away trillions to the richest 1 percent, then adding to average consumer energy costs and exacerbating America’s inequality problem.
The bill will kill millions of new jobs and undermine the manufacturing industries of the future like advanced energy, hurting our workers while helping China. And the bill will worsen climate impacts that are undermining the safety of tens of millions of Americans each year.
Under the House-passed bill all American families making less than $30,000 a year will be worse off, and those with incomes under $10,000 would lose more than $2,700. But the richest top 1 percent get an average giveaway of $82,000 — a $96 billion windfall in 2027 alone. The Senate bill will do much the same.
Combined with Trump’s tariffs, the bill will “reduce the living standards and raise costs for millions of families with modest incomes,” according to the respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The original House bill would cause 16 million Americans to lose health coverage and become uninsured by 2034 because of the Medicaid cuts in the bogus bill.
The Senate bill has the same problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the upper chamber’s legislation would result in 11.8 million Americans losing their health insurance by 2034, as federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare is reduced by $1.1 trillion over that same period. So any final bill will almost certainly take health care away from over 11 million Americans.
But that’s not all. This obscene wealth transfer will undermine America’s economic future, with the average U.S. taxpayer owing tens of trillions more just in interest payments in coming years. No wonder Moody’s, the key bond rating firm, downgraded the U.S. credit rating after the House bill passed. It will mean higher borrowing costs for homes, autos and businesses, and a bleaker future for regular folks across the country.
What’s more, American household energy costs will rise $170 billion every year over the next decade. New jobs will fall by more than 830,000 in 2030 alone, and another 720,000 by 2035. Reductions in energy manufacturing and production will hurt economic growth, cutting GDP by more than $1 trillion over a decade. And wholesale electricity prices in America would rise 19 percent by 2030 and 61 percent by 2035.
The irony is that all of these new impediments to additional U.S. homegrown energy production in the bill would happen just as U.S. demand for electricity is skyrocketing, meaning that consumers and businesses will face higher energy costs.
The bill will also exacerbate the flooding, wildfires, storms and heat waves that are ravaging every part of the country, adding tens of billions of dollars to household insurance costs and government budgets by worsening climate impacts. An analysis from Princeton University researchers concluded the bill would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 10 billion metric tons over the next decade, making climate impacts more severe.
In fact, what Congress and the president should be doing is investing in key manufacturing industries to compete with China and grow millions of jobs, including in new forms of cleaner energy. They should be shoring up our public health sector, especially for children, not taking health care away from average Americans. They should be cracking down on tax evasion by the richest scofflaws, which costs all of us trillions in lost tax revenue each year.
But Trump’s bill does the opposite of this, selling out the future of America, killing millions of future jobs, and raising costs on average Americans.
As Musk said, “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” The Congress should kill this bogus bill — and start again with something better.
Assuming it doesn’t, the American people should — and likely will — kick this Republican Congress out of office next year. Then we can elect a better Congress in 2026, and truly start over.
Paul Bledsoe is a policy lecturer at American University; he served as a staff member on the Senate Finance Committee under former Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan.