Good News about the Big, Beautiful Bill

Normal people hate it.

Yes, it’s bad news that the actually-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed the Senate today.

But there is some good news: people hate it, and the more they learn about it, the more their hatred grows. And so, dear reader, I make this request: talk about it.

1.

American electoral politics is stupid. Only a minority of people follow politics closely, which makes the things that politically-minded people should and do care about — due process, democratic norms, foreign policy, federal judges — practically irrelevant for national elections.

And so, as we saw last year, Americans will elect a felonious insurrectionist madman to the White House if they think he can handle the economy better than a qualified but elite-seeming black woman would. This drives progressives crazy, of course, but then again, New Yorkers just elected a 33-year-old socialist with no government experience to be the Democratic mayoral candidate for the same reasons. So this isn’t partisan. For better or for worse, people vote based on their pocketbooks, not on the ideological issues that political junkies care about.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” James Carville told the Clinton campaign in 1992. “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” promised the Republican Party in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.

But live by the economy, die by the economy — and Trump is dying. His public approval ratings are dismal, and while we might think that’s because of, I don’t know, ICE arresting brown-skinned people who are here legally and have committed no crime, in large part it’s because of the economy.

Enter the Big, Beautiful Bill.

The topline, non-political-junkie take on the BBB is accurate: tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And people hate it. As CNN’s Harry Enten showed, the bill’s net approval ratings range from -19 to -29, depending on the poll. Miraculously, the depredations of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ are poking through the seas of apathy, TikTok nihilism, and right-wing agitprop.

The thing is, as

Paul Krugman

pointed out in his column today, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are popular. Yes, even Medicaid, which benefits poor people, because the percentage of Americans who use it has grown from 14% in 2008 to 21% today. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of people know those people and know they aren’t lazy scammers leeching off the system. On the contrary, as Krugman notes, large majorities of Americans have a positive view of the program:

So, our job is clear: talk about the Big Beautiful Bill, and keep talking about it even when Trump tries to change the subject.

2.

Obviously, progressives should all be focused on the 2026 midterms and taking back at least one house of Congress from Republicans. But talking about the BBB has longer term benefits too, because this bill is the same bullshit Republicans have been selling for forty-five years: trickle-down economics (which does not work), tax cuts overwhelmingly favoring the ultra-rich, and fake populist rhetoric about freedom, opportunity, and small government. Meanwhile, in every Republican administration since Reagan, the wealth gap has ballooned, the debt has grown, economic opportunities for the working and middle class have evaporated, and the social safety net has been shredded. The only people who come out ahead under Republican budgets are the ones who were ahead to begin with.

Since Reagan, the strategy has been simple: combine fake-populist “Free Enterprise” rhetoric (fake because Republican policies only benefit the richest individuals and largest corporate entities) with a flavor-of-the-month approach to social conservatism: whether it’s immigration, fighting ‘terrorism’, anti-wokeness, low-key racism (welfare queens, Willie Horton, DEI hires), the pledge of allegiance, flag-burning, abortion, gay rights, trans rights… whatever Fox News viewers get the most angry about.

I’m guessing younger readers haven’t even heard of some of those issues, but I’m old enough to remember them. It’s always the same bait-and-switch, and it’s amazing that Republicans keep getting away with it. Enrage and terrify the masses about communism, Muslim terrorists, immigrant gangs, or whatever, and then sell them a bag of economic horseshit that sounds good but actually makes their lives worse. The great innovation of Reagan was getting the white working class to vote against their economic interests. And so they have done, time and time again.

In this larger context, the Big Beautiful Bill is, economically speaking, more of the same, while at the same time being unprecedented from a social-political point of view.

Currently clocking in at 940 pages long (though who knows how the House and Senate versions will be reconciled), here are some of the highlights, some of which you’ve doubtless heard about and some of which you may not have:

• Extend the 2007 ‘temporary’ tax cut for ultra-rich taxpayers, at a cost of $2 trillion (i.e. two thousand thousand million).

• Pass other tax cuts (including limiting the estate tax, which only affects the top 0.1% of taxpayers), costing another $4 trillion

• Cut Medicaid and Medicare in a variety of ways (increasing copays, imposing work requirements, end expanded Medicaid), saves about $1 trillion. Estimates are that 16 million people will lose their health coverage.

• Cut food stamps (used by 40 million people)

• Roll back credits for solar and wind energy and impose a tax (!) on clean energy projects

• Claw back Inflation Reduction Act funds for greener buildings, airplanes, etc.

• Cut student loan relief, making it harder for students to repay loans

• Increase defense spending by $200 billion

• But ICE spending on steroids, with $45 billion for new prisons, $45 billion for the border wall, $31 billion for ICE personnel, $12 billion for homeland security

• Cut funds to National Park Service, NOAA, and FEMA (which is functionally eliminated by the BBB).

• And last and least, the ridiculous, shameful bribe to Sen. Lisa Murkowski that gives special tax deductions to whaling and fishing villages in Western Alaska, in exchange for her support of the bill. Really impressive, that one.

This is just a restaurant-napkin sketch of the bill, of course, but even from this you can see that the savings don’t add up to the costs. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded the Big Beautiful Bill would add $4 trillion to the national debt. So much for budget hawks.

And so much for any pretense that Trump’s Republican Party is any different from Reagan’s or Nixon’s. This has long been the great GOP con: appeal to the working class with social issues and talk of free enterprise, but kneecap them when it comes to tax policy. God, those oligarchs must be laughing. They probably can’t believe that, once again, they put one over on those dumb MAGA crackers.

3.

Obviously, talking about the Big Beautiful Bill at your family dinner table is not going to convince your racist MAGA uncle to change teams. But he’s not your audience, and neither is anyone who hates Trump already. The audience for BBB messaging is people who could just as easily vote Republican as Democratic, and the point is to speak to their real concerns, not the concerns that you or I think they should have.

Again, I think this whole situation is lousy. We should have an educational system and a media ecosystem that inculcates values of civic responsibility and the common good. Trump’s attacks on the rule of law should be dispositive. But we don’t have those things, and people have the priorities they have.

So talk about the billionaire tax cuts. And while you’re at it, mention that grocery prices have continued to rise — Trump hasn’t done a thing to stop that. He’s done a lot of stupid crap – a military parade on his birthday that turned out to be a big bust, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and spending $53 million of taxpayer money (and counting) on his golf trips. But when it’s come to real policies that would make a difference for people who are hurting, he’s done bupkes.

Again, I know that the BBB may not seem like the central human rights issue of this moment. Overwhelmingly innocent people are being grabbed off the street by ICE or paid bounty-hunters. The core institutions of civil society — higher education, the media, the law — are under ultra-nationalist attack. The merciless annihilation of Gaza continues.

But if the polling data is correct, this horrifying mass transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest might be Trump’s biggest mistake yet, in terms of political consequences. And best of all, it’s shared by nearly every Republican in Congress — many of whom are up for re-election in little over a year.

For me, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance to focus on the BBB when there are so many egregious attacks on what makes America truly great. But then I ask myself: Do I want to feel better, or do I want to stem the tide of fascism in America?

Spread the word. The Big, Beautiful Bill is a Big Billionaire Bailout, and a Brutal Budget of Betrayal. I call Bullshit.

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Other light reading:

• Jeff Tiedrich
  on — here’s a phrase I never imagined writing — Florida’s new concentration camp and Trump’s new line of cologne.

• Heather Cox Richardson
  has all the receipts of the moral atrocity of the BBB.

• Headline of the week goes to

  Chris Geidner
  : “John Roberts puts off deciding where he stands on fascism”

Finally, my little attempt at alliteration has nothing on this gem by longtime internet grammar nerd Elle Cordova: