Robbing The Poor To Give To The Rich

The House GOP's tax cut bill is one of the greatest wealth transfers in American history ... and toward the rich.

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Reverse Robin Hood

Last night, when most of you were in bed, the US House of Representatives passed one of the pieces of domestic legislation in modern American history.

The GOP’s Big, Beautiful Bill will create a nearly $4 trillion hole in the deficit. It will cut $267 billion in federal spending for SNAP, which more than 42 million low-income people rely on to put food on the table for their families. And it would cut nearly $700 billion from federal funding for Medicaid.

Those Medicaid cuts could cause roughly 8 million to lose health insurance, and thanks to other onerous provisions in the legislation, that number could rise to 15 million.

These were the data points I used for my MSNBC column this week. But that was before the GOP tightened the work requirements for Medicaid recipients in the legislation, which will likely cause even more Americans to lose access to health care coverage.

The work requirement in the bill that just passed the House represents the strictest version Republicans in Congress have ever put forward.

… By designing the work requirement proposal to be so rigid, the change could be just as transformative to the program as other large cuts that Republicans rejected. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this and other Medicaid changes in an earlier version of the bill would cause 7.6 million people to become uninsured. Most of the people expected to lose coverage would be eligible for the program but unable to prove it under the law’s strict paperwork standard.

To be clear, because the bill was rewritten only hours before the vote, House members did not know the exact number of people who would lose health insurance and food assistance or even the bill’s full cost. There wasn’t enough time to do a full CBO analysis.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about this legislation is that it quite literally steals from the poor to benefit the rich.

According to the CBO’s estimate, household resources for the poorest people would decrease by 4% over the next eight years, while the richest people’s household resources would increase by 4%.

If enacted, the bill would constitute the largest transfer of wealth from the needy to the wealthy in American history.

But remember, folks, it’s the Democrats who are out of touch with working-class Americans.

The Never-Ending Lies

Photo by Eleonora Francesca Grotto on Unsplash

What gets me about this bill is the shameless ways in which Republicans are lying about it.

Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary said the bill would not increase the deficit and that there are “$1.6 trillion worth of savings in this bill” and that this number represents “the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.”

This is a lie.

When Trump was asked, “Can you guarantee that your voters who supported you, working class voters, will not lose health insurance under this bill?” he responded, “Oh, they won't lose health insurance.” He also said that when it comes to Medicaid “We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful. The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse.”

These are both lies.

Trump was also asked “How can you justify cutting food assistance?” He said the “cut is going to give everybody much more food because prices are coming down.

Another lie.

As I note in my MSNBC piece:

House Republicans have consistently claimed that the bill’s work requirements for Medicaid recipients are meant to get the “able-bodied” into the workplace. Such people, according to the No. 2 Republican in the House, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, are “living in their mom’s basement playing video games.”

This isn’t a lie per se, but it’s a gross mischaracterization. In fact, nearly two-thirds of those on Medicaid are already working. Almost all other recipients aren’t working because of caregiving, school, illness, or disability.

To say this bill is a disaster is an understatement.

Can It Be Stopped?

If there is any reason for slight optimism, it is that the bill passed the House and likely will undergo serious modification when it gets to the Senate. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has already railed against the Medicaid cuts, and the Senate parliamentarian will likely remove some of the non-budget-related provisions in the legislation. But make no mistake: a bill in some form will pass. It will provide a massive tax cut for the wealthy and will likely have some Medicaid cuts. It will widen income inequality, hurt the most vulnerable Americans, and make it increasingly difficult for future Democratic administrations to devote any resources to pressing national challenges (because of a lack of tax revenue).

There is no silver lining here.

From a political standpoint, I find the whole exercise a bit bewildering. House Republicans have put their names on a bill that will prominently feature in Democratic campaign ads throughout 2026. Dems in purple or blue districts can spend most of next year accusing their opponents of granting tax cuts to billionaires while cutting health care coverage and food assistance for poor people … and it will be true. House Republicans surely concluded that they’d rather risk losing their seats in the general election than facing a primary challenge paid for by a vengeful Trump. Either way, the House GOP majority looks even more tenuous than it did before.

What’s Going On

• ICE arrested a Danish man at his citizenship hearing. The man, Kasper Erikson, is married to an American woman, has four American kids, and is being held because 10 years ago he forgot to fill out an immigration form after his wife had a stillborn. He’s been in ICE custody for a month and is now facing possible deportation.

• On a more positive note, Ximena Arias-Cristobal is free.

• The incessant delegitimization of an entire state and its people, as well as incitement to violence (like saying “globalize the intifada”) inevitably lead to what happened last night in Washington, DC — the murder of two Israeli diplomats who were planning to get married.

• I’ll have more to say about Michael Podhorzer’s latest post, but this paragraph speaks volumes.

  Keep these numbers in mind: Trump would have lost the Electoral College if: (a) only about 1 in 70 Trump voters in the Blue Wall switched their vote, or (b) if only about 1 in 25 nonvoters had voted for Harris, or (c) if only about 1 in 100 Trump voters switched AND only about 1 in about 80 nonvoters cast ballots for Harris.⁷ It would have taken an even smaller and more plausible shift for Trump to have lost the popular vote, given that nearly three-quarters of the difference between Biden and Harris’s vote total were in cities and Blue States.

  I flagged this because it's a good reminder that margins of victory in recent POTUS elections have been quite narrow, and the need for either party to conduct a systemic overhaul is wildly overstated. Remember, the GOP didn’t change anything between 2020 and 2024 and didn’t stop the party from taking back the White House. One could argue that the shifts in voter preferences over the last two POTUS elections have more to do with external, non-political factors (COVID in 2020, anti-incumbency in 2024) than messaging or party failures. As I’ve said before, the Democrats’ best path forward is to ride an anti-Trump backlash, and more than anything else, that will drive their political prospects over the next few election cycles.

• In related news, Democratic donors are weirdly committed to lighting money on fire by refighting the 2024 election.

• Remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote that Trump’s deals with law firms were little more than words on paper and not enforceable. Turns out I was right.

• Fascinating article in the Times on the deliberations inside the Trump administration about the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

• Always read Tom Edsall.

• Trump voters in Mississippi are still awaiting federal help after a deadly hurricane … which is a helpful reminder that some people just never learn.

• Read my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown on why Kristi Noem not knowing what habeas corpus is … is bad.

Musical Interlude

Over the weekend, I went a bit nuts record shopping … here are some cuts from a few of the albums that I picked up.