For the last 236 years, the U.S. House of Representatives has begun each day of session with a prayer. The Senate does the same. Each body has a “nonsectarian, nonpartisan and nonpolitical” chaplain who “provides spiritual counseling and guidance” to its members.
The chaplains would do well to remind lawmakers of a truism: The moral test of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. President Trump has flooded the zone with failures in that regard. Congress has done nothing about it. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is an opportunity for some redemption.
Middle-class Americans helped Trump take back the presidency, but he has focused on serving the rich, notably including himself. The bill he considers beautiful, which narrowly passed the House and is now before the Senate, has ugly provisions for America’s most vulnerable people. Among other things, it shamelessly cuts assistance for the poorest Americans to continue tax cuts for the rich.
Trump’s behavior has renewed the mention of “pitchforks” in the national conversation (a reference to a 19th-century rebellion by peasants). Eleven years ago, billionaire Nick Hanauer wrote a warning to his “fellow zillionaires.” He pointed out that his superpower was to anticipate future trends. “What do I see in our future now?” he asked. “I see pitchforks … because the divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast.”
Now, billionaire Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates has told Forbes that he and his fellow billionaires might soon face mobs armed with pitchforks unless they do something about America’s persistent wealth gap.
Recent data show that 10 percent of wealthy Americans own 93 percent of all stocks, up from 81 percent a decade ago. The richest 1 percent hold $25 trillion in stocks, while the bottom half of U.S. households own less than 1 percent. The median retirement savings for half of Americans is zero, while families in the top 10 percent have median savings of more than $600,000.
Hanauer explained that Reagan’s famed trickle-down economics does not work. “The fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers,” he argued, “which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates rich people, not the other way around.”
So, why have House Republicans passed a “beautiful” bill that retains tax cuts for the rich by taking $800 billion from Medicaid and leaving 3 million policyholders without coverage under the Affordable Care Act? Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the bill “ugly and disgusting,” part of the “largest redistribution of wealth in the nation’s history.”
The moral test is not only about money. It’s also about our children’s future. In line with Trump’s disastrous energy policy, the bill ends federal investments in clean energy and provides new benefits for the oil and gas industry. Trump has unilaterally cut nearly every program with “climate” in its mission. He is trying to manhandle states into ending their efforts to mitigate global warming.
The least of us — low-income households and children — will suffer most. Studies recently published in Nature show that “large fractions of future generations will be exposed to extreme climate events” that usually occur only once every 10,000 years.
Children have no defense except moral persuasion to protect their future. Under current U.S. and international policies, their world will be much less livable than it has been for their parents. As the editors of Nature point out, “Children and young people born in the present decade face exposure to heat waves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires, and tropical cyclones in a way that their parents and grandparents never did,” the editors wrote. Even if civilization could hold global warming to 1.5 degrees, the most ambitious and now probably unattainable goal of the Paris climate agreement, more than half of the world’s children born in 2020 will experience an “unprecedented life” of exposure to heat waves.
Future generations will also pay the price of Trump’s war against science. His administration has fired or displaced thousands of scientists from the federal government, defunded research on topics vital to the nation’s health and welfare, and infected federal science with politics and misinformation.
These reductions are shaking America’s reputation as the world’s science leader. Three-fourths of the 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll said they may leave the U.S. to continue their work in other nations. Walter Robinson, a professor of atmospheric sciences, warns that the epicenter of science research will shift from the U.S. to China, the European Union or other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Michael S. Lubell, a physics professor at the City College of New York and a former official at the American Physical Society, says it will take a generation to fix the brain drain Trump is causing in America’s science workforce
Trump’s war on science makes no sense unless it’s motivated by the same factors behind his assaults on the news media, the courts, and various watchdog organizations. They all reveal how petty, selfish, corrupt and misinformed he is.
William S. Becker is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director who administered energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies programs. He is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 and is not affiliated with the White House.