America for Sale! Everything Must Go!
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” trades tax cuts on millionaires for the dissolution of society
Hamilton Nolan
The U.S. government has fallen into the hands of people who lack proper metaphors; all they know is business. The nation should be “run like a business” according to these unimaginative suits among the GOP, who haven’t read or studied enough to consider how the government might be run like anything else. The problem with this thinking is it will, by inevitably following the profit motive, lead to a terminal phase. With the House passage of President Donald Trump’s budget legislation “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the United States has reached the private equity looting stage of the metaphor.
The logic of this scheme will collapse, but it might bring us all down with it.
Two hundred and fifty years of civic investment in the United States of America is now over. Like all private equity firms, the Republican Party of 2025 is here to loot. Generations of Americans built this country — the immigrants, the workers, the inventors, the visionaries, the winners and losers whose combined sweat and suffering produced the wealthiest nation in the world. It is the view of the Trump administration and its supporters, these businessmen masquerading as politicians, that the time has come to withdraw all of that wealth and put it in their own pockets. As anyone in business knows, if you stop investing in a business and use all of the capital to build yourself a mansion instead, the business will collapse. It will not be passed onto future generations. It will not continue to perform its tasks. The workers will get screwed.
They don’t care. The vampires have their fangs bared. They’re ready to suck America dry.
Many people have observed that, though Trump has never been the top choice of the Republican establishment, the GOP will support him as long as he gives them their tax cuts — their true top priority. The One Big Beautiful Bill represents the fulfillment of that bargain. It is, like all politics under Trump, a cartoonishly exaggerated version of what has come before. It would give those with annual $1 million incomes a tax cut one thousand times larger than Americans in the bottom quintile of incomes. It literally takes food out of the mouths of poor people to fill the pockets of the rich, slashing Medicaid and SNAP by nearly a trillion dollars. It is class war made flesh.
Par for the course for Republican economic packages, the bill will increase inequality and increase poverty. What may make it America’s tipping point into existential crisis is the fact that, with today’s Republican Party, all policy tensions are resolved in favor of the worse option. Republicans cannot unite around rebuilding anything, so the House bill amounts to a garbage can full of theft and destruction. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency failed to meaningfully cut the government’s budget, but it succeeded in destroying valuable federal services. Those clamoring for more high-skilled immigrants lost to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s demands for mass deportations. The areas the bill does spend on, like the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will crush the United States’ human capital and cause massive losses down the road. The bill’s utterly wasteful tax cuts will increase the debt, which Republicans go on and on about wanting to reduce.
After stocking the Trump administration with a grab bag of degenerate con artists, washed-up TV stars and white supremacists, the Republicans in Congress and the business donors who support them are left with no legitimate trophies to show off — except tax cuts. Feed the rich, starve the public and let the government collapse.
The wealthy who will win out from this bill should view these tax cuts as one of the last refunds they will get in return for the dissolution of the mighty U.S. federal government. It represents the profoundly foolish belief that they, capitalism’s winners, will be able to lead flourishing lives without any help from the wider society. Hire your own private firefighters! Build your own libraries! Send your kids to private schools! Hell, start your own private currency and ride it to the moon!
We are witnessing the consequence of an entire class of people who have drunk too deeply from capitalism’s sweet, self-sustaining mythos. Blind to the centuries of collective effort that built the world they enjoy, the rich elite fancy themselves a bunch of Randian supermen who will make out like bandits with the brilliant, never- before-conceived heist of “pulling up the ladder behind you.”
By forsaking all obligations to past, present and future humanity, the Republican donor class might be able to add a few percentage points to their net worth. Temporarily. Until the seas rise and the service workers revolt and the people who mow their lawns have all been deported. But the smiling rich have not thought that far ahead.
It is, one must admit, a little funny that all of these fantastically lucky winners of history — those who enjoy the highest standard of living that Earth has ever seen— have allowed themselves to sink so deep into narcissism and incuriosity that they acquiesce to the dismantling of the very system that makes them rich.
We are wasting our national inheritance. We are burning our house for firewood. When winter descends upon us, as it will, these people will find that their extra dollars are not nearly enough to buy back the society we used to have.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
