The Moral Knots in the Big Beautiful Bill

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — and of course it passed this Cickenshit Congress, even if by a narrow margin — should really be called the One Big Cruel Bill. This is where we’re at in the United States of America.

Here’s a summary of the Senate version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (H.R. 1), which the House had to accept without making any changes in order to avoid a conference committee.

🏛️ Major Tax & Budget Changes

  • Extends Trump-era 2017 tax cuts permanently, including corporate, small-business (Section 199A), and expensing provisions.
  • Child Tax Credit adjusted to $2,200 (down from $2,500 in earlier versions) .
  • Senior tax break increased to $6,000.
  • SALT deduction cap raised temporarily to $40,000 for households under $500K, reverting to $10K after five years.

💊 Healthcare & Medicaid Overhaul

  • Massive Medicaid cuts: ~ $930 billion over 10 years, deeper than House version (CBO estimates ~11.8 million Americans could lose coverage over the next decade).
  • Work requirements expanded, including for parents with children over 14.
  • Provider tax for Medicaid phased out more aggressively—shrinking from 6% to 3.5% by ~2031.
  • Rural Hospital Fund: $50 billion allocated to support small facilities.

🇺🇸 Immigration & Border Security

  • Border and ICE funding ramped up, including:
    • $46.5B for wall construction;
    • $45B for detention;
    • $30B for ICE hires.

🌞 Energy & Environment

  • Rollback of clean energy tax credits: subsidies for wind, solar (and EV credits) scaled back or tied to domestic content—limited viability after 2028 investors.com.
  • Nuclear energy incentives restored: Production credits extended through 2032–2033

🛡️ Defense & National Security

  • Defense & immigration budgets near $150B each.
  • Missile defense (“Golden Dome”): $25 billion including hypersonic and space-based interceptors.

📊 Fiscal Outlook & Political Fallout

  • The current U.S. federal debt ceiling (set at approximately $36.1 trillion) is increased by $5 trillion (vs. $4 trillion in House version).
  • Deficit impact: CBO estimates +$3.26 trillion as opposed to the current CBO projection of a $1.9 trillion deficit.

And this is all happening in an environment where companies like Tesla, General Electric, Amazon, General Motors and T-Mobile paid as little as 0.4% on their earned income. 

Large pharmaceutical firms — including AbbVie, Amgen, Bristol‑Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer — did not pay U.S. corporate income tax on their 2023 profits. They effectively shifted profits offshore and had zero domestic tax liability. 

Nearly 10% of S&P 500 companies reported zero income tax expense in 2023.

A recent GAO report found that 34% of large, profitable corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2018.

It’s not just the corporations. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn & George Soros have paid little or no income tax over the last handful of years (and they land on both sides of the political aisle).

How greedy can we get?

By now it’s absolutely, crystal clear that in this world economy, none of this money is going to “trickle down” to the rest of us.

And with respect to health care, many Americans are at risk of losing health insurance under the Medicaid with, the CBO projecting 10–12 million will lose Medicaid coverage by 2034—and combined with ACA changes, up to 17 million uninsured 

Why are coverage losses likely to happen? Well here’s why:

  1. New unrealistic work & documentation requirements in Medicaid.
  2. Frequent eligibility reviews & red tape.
  3. Reduced federal funding for Medicaid.
  4. Rollbacks to Obamacare marketplace support.
  5. Expiration of enhanced premium tax credits leading to ~5 million losing marketplace coverage.

What are some of the consequences of all of this?

  • Combined with Medicaid losses, total uninsured could reach ~17 million within the next few years.
  • Rural communities rely heavily on Medicaid; cuts threaten closure of 300+ rural hospitals due to unpaid care and less funding 
  • Low-income families, seniors, and disabled individuals lose essential access to care—forcing reliance on expensive emergency services 
  • National health costs may rise, with uninsured patients shifting costs onto insured taxpayers and commercial insurers.

I’m to the point where I say fuck it, let’s close a bunch of rural hospitals, let’s throw a bunch of people off of Medicare and out of their nursing homes.

Again, this may be the only way that the fever breaks. Let’s have a MAGA supporter discover that his mother was thrown out of her nursing home, which closed anyway, and now he can’t find any of the (mostly African) health care workers to assist because they either self-deported or are too scared to show up at an elder care agency.

Let’s see how Fuckface and his cohorts feels about it then.

The moral arc of this country has been twisted into knots, especially among those who identify as evangelical Christians. In the long run this is going to drive massive numbers of young people out of the churches, as the cognitive dissonance required to believe while seeing how people are actually treated exceeds the capacities of many young minds.

There is no intellectual way to defend this stuff anymore. There just isn’t.

About a1skeptic

A disturbed citizen and skeptic. I should stop reading the newspaper. Or watching TV. I should turn off NPR and disconnect from the Internet. We’d all be better off.
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1 Response to The Moral Knots in the Big Beautiful Bill

  1. Anonymous says:

    Absolutely agree — and despair right alongside you. MAGA isn’t a political movement anymore, it’s a full-blown cult welded to Trump’s ego. No facts, no fallout, not even personal loss seems to break the spell. At this point, it feels like we’re all just waiting for reality to crash hard enough that even the deluded can’t look away.

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