I’m an Economist. The GOP Budget Undeniably Takes From the Working Class and Gives to the Rich

As seen in Time

The GOP claims to be the party of the working class. Their budget, which House Republicans are rushing to vote on, says the opposite.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about what New York Times writer David Leonhardt has called the “class inversion of American politics—with most professionals supporting Democrats and more working-class people backing Republicans.” If this political “class inversion” is real, it seems awfully hard to square with the signature policy of the second Trump Administration: the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill” (OBBB). This bill will result in easily the largest one-time upward redistribution of income in U.S. history.

Take one jarring symmetry: the spending cuts to health care and food assistance programs in the bill will average about $120 billion each year over the next decade while the new tax cuts for households already making over $500,000 each year will average just over $120 billion per year.

The OBBB combines staggeringly large benefits to the richest households in the country with outright cuts to incomes of the bottom 40%. This combination of spending cuts for the vulnerable and tax cuts for the rich leads to the stunning result summarized in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office: the poorest 20% of U.S. households will see income losses of almost 4% under this bill while the richest 10% will see gains of over 2%. In dollar terms, the tax provisions of the OBBB are equivalent to writing annual checks of $296,000 to every single taxpayer with an annual income over $5 million, and checks of $55,300 to all taxpayers with annual incomes between $1 million and $5 million.