~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Under the childish name, the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) [kind of like Hubba Hubba], the average citizen will suffer.
Big Bill rips out formerly agreed upon funding for Medicaid, Medicare and Obama’s Affordable Care Act, ensuring that middle and lower wealth individuals will pay more for less healthcare.
It will push lots of folks – million – off any kind of health help at all and diminish the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) simply by the increase in fewer able people working.
And OBBBA increases debt by helping the wealthy in the usual ways:
–Allowing businesses to write off 100 percent of the cost of new equipment AND property [I think it would be fairer to allow the 99 percent of just plain citizens to write off 100 percent of the cost of new equipment like refrigerators and washing machines AND the entire cost of property, like a new house . . . which would increase the opportunity for generational wealth, which has diminished drastically into the Income Disparity/Wage-Pay Gap/Economic Inequality of recent years and thus impoverished the middle class and therefore our nation.
–Allows the cap on deductions for state and local taxes to increase to $40,000 from $10,000 if you make less than $500,000 a year, but this lasts for only four years, then it returns permanently to the $10,000 cap.
–You can now receive up to $15 million from a family estate or as a gift from a relative without paying taxes on it at all. Not too bad, although most of the middle class isn’t leaving that much money that often; and the money’s already been taxed when earned by the giver, so it’s always seemed a greedy maneuver by the government anyway that I would be taxed upon receiving a gift.
–Repeals tax credits for green energy, such as electric vehicles and residential energy products (like solar panels); so much for doing something about the warming of the earth, which may have all people in equatorial areas moving in with us sooner than expected, not forgetting to mention the increasing cost of global warming, which requires government billions to fight forest fires and repair extreme damage done by them, and hurricanes and floods and droughts.
–For four years, we working class will not have to pay taxes on tips or overtime (I don’t know of any of the wealthy who have to rely on tips or overtime, so they will not be able to benefit from this), and there will be a deduction on auto loan interest and an additional deduction for some seniors; “all of which violate basic tax principles of treating taxpayers equally” (The Tax Foundation) – that’s rich, isn’t it, “treating taxpayers equally”?; then, in 2034, we’ll resume paying those taxes again.
With just this partial list of big, beautiful things voted on for our benefit by Congress, the OBBBA gives the middle class a couple of four-year gifts, takes them back in ‘34, gives the very wealthy permanent breaks and in the process raises the country’s debt into the trillions.
The Big Beautiful is not exactly tax reform, as insinuated by those in favor of it; it’s merely another bill like the one the President managed to get passed in 2017 that favored the already rich by permanently reducing corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent and lowering their individual tax bracket from 39.6 percent to 37 percent.
The top tax rate for high earners after the Second World War was 91 percent. Those were the years that good and important things were taken care of – interstate highways, regional and local airports, bridges, libraries, schools, veterans encouraged to go to college and buy a home on the GI Bill, social safety nets against poverty. As wishy-washy as he is, as telling back-to-back contradictory lies as he does, as TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) as he has been, as NACHO (Not a Chance Hormuz Opens) as he is so far, the President is straight arrow on helping himself and his ilk.
