Truthful names for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
Attempts at honesty
You may have heard that Republicans in Congress (barely) passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a few days ago and the driveler-in-chief signed it into law with his usual five-year-old with a Sharpie style on America’s 249th birthday. The total cost of the bill is $4.5 trillion, or $4,500,000,000,000, or $4.5 million millions. Or, put another way, that’s equal to over $34,000 every single minute since we told King George to kiss off July 4, 1776.
But, to be fair, I’m not particularly worried about the cost. We’re a big country with a big economy and spending that amount of money isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The problem isn’t the amount of money being spent. The problem is what it’s being spent on.
Almost half the money goes toward making permanent the 2017 tax cuts, which skewed heavily toward the wealthy. Immigration and Customs Enforcement receives $169 billion. And the Department of Defense receives another $158 billion, despite already spending more than the next eleven countries combined.
To help pay for all of that ridiculousness, Medicaid will be cut by $841 billion, resulting in about 10 million Americans losing their health insurance. Women’s access to health care will be hurt. Clean Energy tax credits will be phased out. Student loans will be harder to get and more difficult to pay back. The planet will be hotter and more polluted.
It’s quite common in American history for important legislation to be given a plain name that aptly describes what the bill does. Bills like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the Affordable Care Act described their purpose with their name. Good luck trying to decipher what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act does, other than indicate that we have a president with the vocabulary of a child.
If Trump and his craven collection of grifters in Congress wanted to be transparent about what their bill does, then they could have named the bill any of the following:
The Defund Women’s Healthcare Act
The Let the Kids go Hungry Act
The Welfare for Billionaires Act
The We Hate Poor People Act
The POP Act – Profits over People
The Educated People Scare Us Act
The What Exactly Are We Conserving? Act
The Make Gun Silencers Cheap Again Act
The Let’s Keep Blaming Immigrants for our Problems Act
The Privatize all Public Schools Act
Perhaps the easiest way to summarize the act would be to call it the We Can’t Build Things, We Can only Destroy Things Act. That is the basic governing principle behind the Republican party, and it’s been that way for years. They are not the party of solutions. They’re the party of fear and grift. Trump’s entire philosophy – to the extent that he actually has a philosophy – is that others are to blame for the country’s problems, and the solution to our problems is to punish marginalized people and give more money to those who already have money. Advocating for more visionary and effective solutions to the country’s problems would require much more preparation, nuance, and engagement with policy than Trump has exhibited throughout his life.
One of the most frustrating aspects of Trump’s political success is the fact that so many people view him as being the perfect person for the job because he’s not like other politicians, or he’s a businessman, or he acts like a mafia leader, or he’s chaotic. His supporters think of those things as being features, not bugs.
But those are qualities that we should expressly avoid when choosing leaders. Government isn’t a business, and it shouldn’t be a crime organization. It should work for all people, but especially those against whom the deck is already stacked. The One Big Beautiful Bill doesn’t work for all people. It further stacks the deck against everyone but those at the very top of the economic ladder. But that’s not surprising given Trump’s personality and history. He’s obsessed with “winners” and in his mind those who make the most money or dominate others are the winners.
It's quite ironic that One Big Beautiful Bill came from such a small ugly man.