[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
President Donald Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBBA) on Independence Day and ushered in a golden age for the American people. The BBBA will bolster border security and military strength, while delivering a huge tax cut for working-and-middle class Americans, as well as for American businesses, to spur economic growth. It will also clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse that have plagued safety net programs such as Medicaid for decades, saving these programs so they can serve the most vulnerable people as originally intended.
The Left is apoplectic, of course, because the Big Beautiful Bill Act will skewer its sacred cows such as open borders, tax-and-spend policies, and government control over society. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Left’s attacks on the BBBA are nothing short of an outrageous pack of lies, designed to spur class warfare. Congressional Democrats and their friends have broadcast these reckless lies, claiming that the BBBA will have deadly consequences.
For example, in a crass appeal to the leftwing, progressive base of the Democratic Party that no longer trusts him, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York dubbed the BBBA the “We’re All Going To Die” Act. Democrat-Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who may run against Schumer in the 2028 New York Democratic Party Senate primary, exclaimed, “People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy.”
Senator Schumer and Rep. Ocasio -Cortez could not be further from the truth. More Americans will live more fulfilling, prosperous lives because of the Big Beautiful Bill Act. And the BBBA will help shut down the deep state bureaucrat kleptocracy that sucks money from taxpayers’ pockets to feed leftwing progressive causes.
Leftists repeatedly demagogue that the BBBA’s across-the-board tax cuts, which permanently codified the reduction in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s individual income tax rates, are a windfall for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of average Americans. For example, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, said “It’s caviar over kids, hedge funds over healthcare, Mar-a-Lago over the middle class.” A Democrat congressman accused Republicans of “stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.”
Contrary to such tiresome, divisive rhetoric, all Americans will benefit from the pro-growth tax incentives that the BBBA provides. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.
Indeed, working-class Americans will receive the largest percentage reduction in their federal income tax liability, as well as exemptions from taxes on tips and overtime. Low and middle-class seniors will benefit from a special social security deduction. The BBBA’s pro-family provisions include an expansion of childcare access as well as an increase in the child tax credit.
The BBBA’s leftwing critics whine that those in the highest income tiers will receive a far greater tax cut in absolute dollars than those in lower income tiers. What they conveniently leave out of their diatribe is that higher-income taxpayers pay an exceedingly higher disproportionate percent of the total amount of income taxes paid to the federal government in the first place.
Based on IRS data recently released for 2022, under America’s progressive income tax system the top one percent of earners paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of tax return filers paid only three percent of all federal income taxes in 2022. Thus, it should not be surprising to any honest person that higher-income taxpayers’ savings in absolute dollars from across-the-board tax cuts will be higher. But that does not diminish the additional thousands of dollars that low-and middle-class households will be able to use for their own benefit thanks to the Trump tax cuts and credits.
The BBBA’s opponents reserve their harshest criticisms for the legislation’s much-needed Medicaid reforms. “We believe in America that healthcare is not simply something that should be available to the privileged few. It is a right that should be available to every single American,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.
Rep. Jeffries and other like-minded critics of the BBBA are creating a red herring with more of their outright lies. The truth is that Democrats have turned Medicaid into a huge welfare giveaway program that has contributed substantially to the ballooning annual budget deficits during the last decade. The BBBA will save Medicaid from possible bankruptcy by eliminating the fraud, waste, and abuse that have overtaken this safety net program, which was originally meant to serve the most vulnerable, low-income people who truly need its benefits.
Until the Obama presidency, eligibility for an individual to receive Medicaid benefits operated within strict parameters. In addition to demonstrating a low enough income to qualify, an applicant had to meet at least one of several eligibility criteria. The criteria included being a child, a parent or caretaker adult of an eligible child, a disabled child or adult, or an aged adult.
Obamacare greatly expanded the pool of eligible Medicaid recipients. Effective January 1, 2014, at the states’ option, all adults under age 65 (including adults without dependent children) having incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level could potentially receive Medicaid benefits, mostly at the federal government’s expense.
In fiscal year 2023, for which the most recent data is available, the U.S. government spent a whopping $614 billion on Medicaid, 2.28 percent of the GDP. But Democrats in Congress and their friends in the media complained that any trimming of the fat would have devastating consequences. They cited estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CB0), whose projections are Democrats’ holy grail, that more than ten million Americans would lose Medicaid coverage because of the Big Beautiful Bill Act’s reforms.
Hayden Dublois and Addison Scherler of the Foundation for Government Accountability presented evidence in their research paper regarding both the CBO’s liberal bias and how its projections tended to “underestimate the costs associated with measures that would increase the size of government and overestimate the cost of tax relief on Americans.”
According to the research paper, in 2010, when Congress passed Obamacare, “CBO predicted that mandatory Medicaid expansion in all 50 states would add 13 million able-bodied adults to the Medicaid rolls once the program was fully implemented.” But after Obamacare’s expansion of the eligibility pool for Medicaid benefits took effect in 2014 and became optional for states to implement if they wished rather than being mandatory, millions more enrolled than the CBO had estimated.
Indeed, in 2017, the CBO itself felt compelled to acknowledge the erroneous projections it made regarding additional Medicaid enrollees under the Obamacare expansion provisions not only in its 2010 report but also in its follow-up 2013 report:
In May 2013, CBO projected that federal spending on people made newly eligible for Medicaid under the ACA [Obamacare] would be $9 billion in 2014, $24 billion in 2015, and $44 billion in 2016. Those estimates incorporated the effects of the Supreme Court ruling that essentially made the expansion of Medicaid optional for states. In actuality, the figures turned out to be much higher—$23 billion, $57 billion, and $65 billion, respectively… In its May 2013 projection, CBO underestimated such spending mainly because it underpredicted the number of people who would enroll in Medicaid. Fewer states expanded eligibility for Medicaid under the ACA than CBO anticipated, but many more people enrolled in Medicaid in expansion states than CBO expected.
In short, as the Medicaid program was expanded way beyond its original mandate and opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse multiplied, Medicaid was heading for serious financial trouble and possible bankruptcy. The CBO’s projections of the harms to Medicaid coverage that its biased liberal bureaucrats claimed the BBBA will cause are no more reliable than the CBO’s past slanted scoring blunders.
The BBBA will restrain the out-of-control growth of federal spending on Medicaid with common sense reforms, which will save Medicaid for those who truly need it.
The Paragon Health Institute explains that to reduce improper Medicaid payments, the BBBA’s procedural reforms include requiring “semiannual eligibility redeterminations” for Obamacare Medicaid expansion enrollees and “real-time address verification to detect dual enrollment” across multiple states.
Another accountability measure will reduce payments to states that are replete with erroneous and other improper Medicaid payments. And expansion states will be prevented from using special funding to pay Medicaid providers more than what Medicare pays.
Curbing improper and excessive payments seems to be of little concern to the BBBA’s opponents, however. And pro-illegal immigrant advocates are aghast that the BBBA reduces the share the federal government pays for illegal immigrants’ medical bills.
Medicaid fraud costs taxpayers billions of dollars, including more than $30 billion in 2024 alone. Proponents of universal government-run healthcare, however, downplay the fraud problem as nothing but a rounding error. They do not believe that losses due to fraud are a legitimate reason to strictly enforce Medicaid eligibility requirements since, in their ideal government-centric society, everyone should be covered by a government-run health plan anyway.
A key BBBA reform that Democrats have strongly condemned requires able-bodied adults without children and parents of children older than fourteen to work, volunteer for community service, or attend an educational program for at least eighty hours a month.
Curiously, including work requirements for some beneficiaries of government entitlement programs was not always a partisan point of contention. For example, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which passed with bipartisan support during the Clinton administration, included a work requirement. Then-Rep. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), now the Senate Minority Whip, said back in the day that “We have got to take people off of welfare and put them to work.” Now he is singing quite a different tune. Senator Durbin is complaining that the BBBA’s Medicare work provision imposes “overly complex paperwork requirements.” Other Democrats have raised similar complaints.
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessen delivered a stinging rebuke against such groundless complaints. He criticized the “group of Democrats who unfortunately seem to think that poor people are stupid.” He concluded that “to have them register twice a year” for Medicaid benefits “is not a burden,” adding that “these people who want to infantilize the poor and those who need these Medicaid benefits are alarmists.”
Ignore the naysayers and prophets of doom who populate the Democratic Party and its leftwing, progressive base. They want the Big Beautiful Bill Act to fail and will do everything they can to derail it. This would enable socialists like AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other rising Democrat stars on the Left to demagogue their way to power and increase government control over the American people’s daily lives.