Cruelty Costs More Than Compassion

The “big beautiful budget bill” that Republicans are looking to pass is full of cruelty and deception masquerading as austerity. Healthcare will worsen, wages will decrease, the debt will explode, and people will suffer.

Let’s look at why.

The tax cuts aren’t really for everyone.

The biggest talking point from Republicans in Congress is that they are trying to make the tax cuts from Trump’s first presidency permanent. However, just like when these cuts were initially implemented, the benefits are mainly for the wealthiest Americans. The poorest Americans will see a decrease in after-tax income.

At the same time, those tax cuts will increase the national deficit by an additional $2.5 trillion over the next decade, which is also why the budget bill includes a $4 trillion increase to the debt ceiling. They’re hoping the public won’t notice. The 2024 deficit was $1.8 trillion.

Medicaid will be more difficult to get for those who need it.

Republicans want to enact work requirements for receiving Medicaid. 92% of adult Medicaid recipients under the age of 65 are either already working or not working due to disability, illness, caregiving, or attending school. As with other federal benefit programs, it is a myth that a large number of able-bodied adults are collecting benefits while not working. Those who do are transitory due to temporary hardship, such as losing their job, and need support while finding work.

One of the first problems with this change is that we’re at a point in our economy where it takes people months to find a new job after being laid off. These work requirements mean the recently out-of-work will lose their healthcare while actively looking for a new job.

If you think, “Well, they can use the ACA marketplace to get insurance,” the open enrollment period for the ACA is being shortened by a month. So now you have a situation where someone had a job, with employer healthcare, then loses that job, is unable to get ACA subsidies, and gets kicked off Medicare for not being able to find a new job fast enough.

How does that help people?

Work requirements are ineffective and expensive.

Work requirements don’t increase employment; they only decrease the number of people with healthcare. This has been proven in Alabama and Georgia, which enacted work requirements for Medicaid. Even worse, those requirements increase the state's costs while not going toward healthcare, such as the $32 million Georgia spent on administration and consulting fees for its work requirement Medicare program called “Pathways.”

The tragic irony is that studies have shown that having access to healthcare increases people’s ability to get and hold a job, while enacting stricter work requirements on aid programs has been shown to reduce employment.

Putting a work requirement on Medicare is precisely the opposite of what we should do. We should ensure every American has healthcare, and the nation will be more prosperous.

Republicans are hurting the people they’re claiming to help.

One of the budget proposal's most promoted aspects is removing tax on tips. The problem is that most tipped workers don’t make enough to pay federal taxes, so there are no savings. However, the changes in Medicaid could cause over 1 million tipped workers to lose their healthcare.

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, described this situation perfectly, saying:

“A no tax on tips proposal, which is like a minuscule percentage of their income and doesn’t affect two-thirds of tips workers because they don’t earn enough to pay federal income tax, is just nowhere near enough to compensate for the fact that we’re going to have millions of these workers lose the ability to take care of themselves, in some cases go into medical debt, in many cases just not take care of themselves.”

Cutting food assistance to needy families.

Forty-two million Americans rely on SNAP for federal food assistance. This shouldn’t be surprising since 44% of full-time workers are not earning a livable wage, and 60% of Americans aren’t earning enough for a minimal quality of life. That is why so many need to rely on help from the government to feed themselves and their children.

The Congressional Budget Office found that 3 million SNAP recipients could lose their benefits with the changes in this bill. And states will need to pick up a larger percentage of the cost, adding hundreds of billions to budgets already struggling to cover education, police, infrastructure, and other services their citizens need.

The list goes on.

Penn Wharton found that this bill will cause the average wage to decrease over the next decade.

Trump claims he wants to bring manufacturing back to the US, but this bill would cut the electric vehicle credit. US auto manufacturers invested heavily in EV production, including battery factories. Without this credit, those manufacturing jobs will be at risk, and the auto industry, which is already suffering from Trump’s tariffs, will suffer more.

The bill introduces new taxes on colleges, which certainly won’t help reduce the extremely high cost of education.

$50 billion is allocated to finish constructing the wall along the US-Mexico border, despite Republicans continually celebrating the historically low migrant encounters and Stanford research showing that previous expensive wall efforts only caused a 0.6% reduction in Mexican-born workers coming to America.

The bill also includes a provision that would allow the administration to terminate the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization it decides is “terrorist-supporting " without due process. The organization targeted would bear the burden of proof, not the government.

“This measure’s real intent lurks behind its hyperbolic and unsubstantiated anti-terrorist rhetoric: It would allow the Treasury Department to explicitly target, harass and investigate thousands of U.S. organizations that make up civil society, including nonprofit newsrooms,” Jenna Ruddock, advocacy director of Free Press Action.

This is a terrible bill for America, and the GOP knows it, which is why they are having so much trouble passing it when all they need are Republican votes to do so.

The real solutions to America’s debt, income, and aid programs are known.

• Higher wages for working and middle-class Americans

• Universal healthcare

• Well-funded public education

• Higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations

• Federally backed job training programs

• Support small businesses and enforce antitrust laws

• Eliminate the cap on paying into Social Security

As it turns out, cruelty is more expensive than compassion. Which means cruelty must be the point of this bill.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/5/16/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-at-a-crucial-juncture

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-work-requirements/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/05/20/trump-tax-bill-could-hurt-low-earners/83724621007/

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/the-relationship-between-work-and-health-findings-from-a-literature-review/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/

https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/study-shows-high-cost-and-low-benefit-border-wall-us-workers