The budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump dramatically signed into law last month will painfully extract $1,200 a year from the poorest people and sprinkle the richest with an extra $13,600 a year they may not even feel.
Of course, we knew even before Monday’s report from the Congressional Budget Office reminded us that Trump’s bill — with its cuts to the social safety net and cuts to top earners’ taxes — would redistribute wealth from the poorest to the richest. Still, it’s worth pointing out that the poorest people will feel the pain from this regressive plan more acutely than the richest people feel the gains.
The Yale Budget Lab, using CBO data, points out that the average household income for the lowest-earning 10% of people in the United States is $39,464. Subtracting $1,200 a year from that can mean skipping meals or utility bill payments or coming up short on rent or car notes. The average household income for the highest-earning 10% is $517,103. Adding $13,600 won’t have any appreciable effect on those earners’ quality of life.
The CBO, which does nonpartisan analysis for Congress, released the above numbers Monday in response to a request from four Democratic lawmakers: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of New York; Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, of Pennsylvania (the ranking member of the House Budget Committee); and Sen. Jeff Merkley, of Oregon (the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee). The CBO’s letter is a response to the Democrats’ “request for an analysis of the distributional effects” of the bill that Republicans are touting as not just good but “beautiful.”
The report found that the average U.S. household “will see an increase in the resources available to them over the 2026–2034 period” but that “the changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households” and that “in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.”
Specifically, the CBO report finds, “Resources for households in the lowest decile (tenth) of the income distribution will decrease by about $1,200 per year (in 2025 dollars),” which “amounts to 3.1% of their income.” The report adds, “Those projected decreases are mainly attributable to reductions in in-kind transfers, such as Medicaid and SNAP.”
The extra 2.7% in income those in the top tenth of income distribution are projected to get “are mainly attributable to reductions in the taxes households in that decile owe.”
If the CBO’s language is too staid or technical for you, then here’s another way to make the point: The bill means much less money for food and health care for the poor and a little more money in the bank for the rich.
Despite Trump’s vows that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, and despite some Republican lawmakers’ vows that they wouldn’t support a bill that cut Medicaid, it was always clear that Republicans — even with all their budgetary sleight of hand — couldn’t give what they wanted to give to the rich without taking away money used to provide health coverage for poor people. By 2034, Medicaid is projected to be serving 10 million fewer people.
But not only did Trump and his party cut Medicaid; the bill is projected to have the effect of cutting 2.4 million people off SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program.
Rather than confess to lying about the impact the bill would have, the Republicans said they weren’t hurting the country’s most vulnerable people, just going after fraud, waste and abuse. On top of that, Republicans suddenly began arguing that numbers from the CBO can’t be trusted.
And so it was this week. Rep. Jason Smith, of Missouri, the Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, claimed on social media that “CBO has a troubled track record of getting its estimates incorrect and, like Democrats, is biased in favor of more federal spending and higher taxes.”
“Don’t buy it,” Smith added.
But the CBO is much worthier of our trust than the Republicans who think it’s “beautiful” to cut food assistance and health insurance for the poor.
Reading the CBO report, I couldn’t help but think of the Bible story in which the prophet tells the king a parable about a wealthy landowner with plenty of cattle and sheep who needs to feed a guest — and does so by stealing the only sheep his neighbor owns. That’s essentially the scheme Trump and Republican lawmakers signed off on. The poor are being made to suffer even more, in exchange for what counts as a pittance to the most prosperous.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
