One year ago, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans forced their Big Beautiful Bill through Congress. Today, it is one of the most unpopular major laws in recent history and continues to lose support with the American public.

The design of the bill was simple and gave millionaires, billionaires and corporations massive tax cuts and paid for them on the backs of working Americans.

Major corporate beneficiaries collectively worth more than $2 trillion received $30 billion in tax benefits. The wealthiest Americans received tax breaks worth tens of thousands of dollars annually. Meanwhile, working families were handed the bill through deep cuts to healthcare and food assistance, higher costs, and trillions of dollars added to the national debt.

Republicans eventually tried to rebrand the law as the “Working Families Tax Cuts.” One year later, working families are beginning to see what the law actually does.

It has increased healthcare costs while cutting Medicaid. It has made it harder for struggling families to afford groceries by imposing restrictions on food assistance. It has shifted enormous costs onto states, hospitals, communities and families.

The Congressional Budget Office put numbers to this upside-down bargain. When the law’s tax and spending changes are considered together, low-income households lose $1,200 a year, while high-income households gain $13,600.

That is not a working families tax cut. It is a redistribution of resources upward. It is a reverse Robin Hood.

The consequences are already reaching far beyond a family’s tax return. Republicans cut $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, threatening health coverage for millions of Americans and destabilizing hospitals and healthcare providers that were already struggling to keep their doors open. Public Citizen researchers identified 446 hospitals at heightened risk of closing or cutting services as Medicaid funding shrinks.

Together, those hospitals serve 7 million patients and employ 250,000 direct care workers. When a hospital cuts maternity care, closes an emergency room, or disappears from a rural community altogether, every family in that community pays the price.

And the corporations that benefited from the law have hardly returned the favor. Major corporations that received billions in tax benefits have since cut nearly 45,000 jobs.

These are the same kinds of corporations that spent millions lobbying for a law that delivered enormous benefits to corporate America. They got their tax cuts. Workers got pink slips. Calling that a “Working Families Tax Cut” does not change who won and who lost.

One year later, the American people are seeing the law for what it is. Corporations and the wealthiest Americans got the benefits. Working families got the bill.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Joshua Miller is the director of Congress Watch at Public Citizen. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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