The juxtaposition at the weekend was apt: one big, ugly bill in Washington and one big, garish wedding in Venice.
This is what days of Senate debate over President Trump and Republicans’ nearly 1,000-page legislation had in common with the days of revelry at the $50-million nuptials of the world’s-third-richest-man, Jeff Bezos, and ever-couture-corseted Lauren Sánchez: an exhibit of excess for a new Gilded Age, encapsulating the gulf between the have-nots and the have-yachts. (Venice’s “yacht ports” were reportedly all booked for the wedding, though not by Bezos’ own 417-foot-long “Koru.”)
The president was invited, natch, but he was a no-show. Consider his legislation his gift to the happy couple. Sánchez and Bezos have much to love in Trump’s absurdly titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” making its way through the Republican-run Congress. But Bezos’ Amazon employees and many of his cut-rate-shopping customers? Not so much.
This may be the most inequitable and overtly reverse-Robin Hood budget behemoth ever. It would make permanent and expand upon the deep Trump tax cuts of 2017 that disproportionately benefited the rich. The multitrillion-dollar cost would be offset by about $1 trillion in healthcare cuts, mostly to the Medicaid program that serves more than 70 million people. Other cuts would end clean-energy projects (costing jobs and ceding the alternative-energy future to China) and slash nutrition programs for the needy. Meanwhile, spending would increase roughly 15-fold for immigration enforcement, paying for purposely cruel detention centers such as Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Bottom line: about $3.5 trillion in additional debt over just the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
This monstrosity would exacerbate what is already record income inequality in the United States. It would reverse the past decade’s decline, under Obamacare, in the number of Americans without health insurance, causing about 17 million people to lose coverage, according to the health-policy nonprofit KFF. More rural hospitals, reliant on Medicaid, would close. Forget the “minutiae of Medicaid policy,” tweeted Vice President JD Vance, supposed elegist of hillbillies and other downtrodden Americans — it’s the extra immigration crackdown cash that counts.
Healthcare threats loom even as two research papers recently reported that Obamacare and its Medicaid expansion have saved the lives of many low-income adults. One study last month found that the proposed cuts could increase preventable deaths by nearly 17,000 annually. The other, in May, concluded that as much as 20% of the well-documented disparity in the lifespans of low- and high-income Americans, with the latter living longer, is attributable to the lack of health insurance among those with lower incomes.
In other words, the supposed One Big Beautiful Bill Act would be a killer.
That, of course, would be the worst of it. But other descriptors are so damning that only Trump’s death grip on fellow Republicans can explain why they’d vote for this politically suicidal package. With polls this bad, the 2026 midterm elections can’t come soon enough to eject Republicans’ rubberstamping majority in Congress and check Trump’s madness.
“The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history,” said the Atlantic of the bill’s particulars. “The biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever,” according to budget guru Bobby Kogan at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “The most expensive piece of legislation probably since the 1960s,” said analyst Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute, “… piling trillions of new borrowing on top of deficits that are already leaping.”
That pile-up couldn’t happen at a worse time.
For decades, budget experts have warned of a coming fiscal tsunami by the 2020s that would swamp the economy as retiring boomers drew from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while federal revenues were drained by tax cuts. Yet Republican presidents and Congresses kept cutting taxes and, in league with Democrats, failed to make necessary and relatively painless adjustments to the so-called entitlement benefit programs.
And now here we are, knifing Medicaid not to make it and the overall budget more fiscally sound, but to offset the cost of more tax cuts favoring the wealthy, driving up debt.
Trump, plainly peeved at talk that he’ll break his first-term record of the most debt in a presidential term ($8.4 trillion), on Wednesday whined in a post, “Nobody wants to talk about GROWTH.”
Americans are on to this fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves. Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump 1.0 all slashed tax rates disproportionately for the rich and corporations, claiming that economic growth would help reduce deficits. They were wrong. For Trump to do it again and expect a different result, is, as the saying goes, the definition of insanity. The only recent Republican president who helped reduce deficits was George H.W. Bush because he raised taxes as part of a balanced, bipartisan package of spending cuts and tax increases — shared sacrifice, something Trump knows nothing about.
Just as the Senate was ending its vote to pass Trump’s bill on Tuesday, sending it back to the House, Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, was heard shouting to Republican senators as he exited, “Shame on you guys.”
Doesn’t he know by now that Trump and his party minions have no shame?
In Venice, Bezos the billionaire groom came in for some razzing too. A huge banner carpeted the famed Piazza San Marco before his three-day bacchanalia: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”
Bezos could, but he won’t. We’ve gone beyond trickle-down tax politics. It’s bottoms up for Bezos, other billionaires and all the mere millionaires. We’ll all suffer the hangover, however, and none more than the most needy among us.
@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes
The post Calmes: In the halls of Congress and on the canals of Venice, the new Gilded Age has a moment appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
