President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, May 22nd, ensuring that this farcical moment in United States history will be remembered as one of the cruelest and most moronic. Future textbooks will need to have footnotes explaining that, yes, this actually happened; yes, they actually called the bill the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; and, yes, it was a budget reconciliation bill introduced by the country’s apparent “fiscally conservative party” that experts estimated would add the paltry sum of $3.8 trillion to the national debt.
The bill seems to derive its name from the big, beautiful, and extremely expensive (for everyday Americans) tax cuts for the incredibly rich. How, though, to pay for such a scheme?
Rob the poor and give to the rich, of course! The age-old strategy, the timeless truth, that the strong take from the weak and keep for themselves. With America’s clever tax structure, all those savings will begin trickling down any time now. Better ready your umbrellas, readers, because there is no way all those big beautiful dollars will be used to pay lobbyists, invest in deregulation and privatization, or fund vanity joy rides to the stratosphere.
Since wealthy titans of industry will be creating so many jobs and flooding the economy with their trickled-down riches, there will be little need for social safety net programs. So they’re on the chopping block to help fund this big, beautiful wealth transfer. The bill would reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to the tune of about $267 billion over 10 years. It would also strengthen work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients, including doing away with current exemptions for parents with children under 18. Those exemptions would now only apply to parents with dependents under the age of 7 years old. Because what the nation needs is a bunch of unsupervised 8-year-old latchkey kids.
Some of the cost of SNAP benefits would be foisted off on the states, which will surely go over well in states like Tennessee, which depend on federal aid to keep the gears turning. In 2028, states would begin to shoulder 5 percent of benefit costs (up from zero) and 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs (an increase of 25 percent, up from half the admin costs).
It’s nonsensical. It’s absurd. And it’s getting more and more difficult to imagine that everyone wants to solve the complicated problems our country faces, but can’t agree on the means to do so. It almost seems as though the People-in-Charge want a poorly educated populace, with everyone working two or three part-time jobs without benefits and renting everything their parents used to own.
There’s more to the bill than kicking the poor while they’re down, of course. It also sets out to kneecap some of former President Joe Biden’s environmental protections, allow increased leasing of public lands for mining and drilling, increase taxes on university endowments, and — at long last! — shuffle a measly additional $150 billion over to the Defense Department, to give America’s grossly underfunded military a much-needed shot in the arm.
This bill is so cartoonishly avaricious as to make The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns blush — and he’s an actual cartoon! A cartoon character who once tried to sell Springfield sunlight, who has a closet full of evening wear made from the pelts of endangered animals. He’s a cartoon character who, quite famously, once actually tried to take candy from a baby!
This cannot continue. Every American — including those one-issue voters whose ballots were cast based solely on anti-abortion sentiment or fear for their right to bear arms — should be disgusted by the absolute lack of morality evidenced by the budget this bill proposes.
It’s this simple: If our nation is strong, it can afford to protect its most vulnerable. If it’s great, it doesn’t need to deny food assistance to children or medical care to the poor. So do we have the strength to help those in need? Do we have the strength to be truly great?
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, have never taken candy from a baby.