50
votes
US Congress passes Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' cutting taxes and spending
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- Title
- Major win for Trump as Congress passes 'big, beautiful bill'
- Published
- Jul 3 2025
- Word count
- 795 words
I've stated a few times before whenever the Trump administration has done something, that it would lead to deaths due to X or Y. Though I'm afraid that this will take the cake. It's physically difficult to criticize in detail, but let's try shall we. I really don't want injustice to go unspoken even if it's on a small Internet forum that's in many ways it's own bubble. Giving abusers silence tend to give them strength.
With the Medicaid cuts, this will mean that less people will have access to healthcare. Especially people who are disabled and reliant on it are at risk of being unable to live, physically or mentally. Also, given that it's not long ago that a healthcare insurance company CEO got assassinated, and a lot of people cheered on its occurrence, this is a recipe for even more political violence.
Related on that, food stamps are going to become more difficult for a lot of people. Perhaps more people will have to steal food like in the far past. That's just disgusting on so many levels that I'm not going in depth on it for now.
With the 'migration' and the ICE, it's difficult to say exactly how fast, but we can expect more people getting locked up in concentration camps, as well as more resistance. Again, this is a recipe for political violence and even potential insurgencies against ICE. Depending on how quickly ICE will expand I wouldn't even completely rule out a few new people within the ICE actually fighting against this by informing people and communities in secret that they're out for hunting. Yes, hunting. That's basically what it will entail.
Scrapping green energy policies will worsen climate change, though personally, depending on how bad the economy will be impacted by this dumpsterfire reduced consumption may actually. I don't want to call it help if I'm being honest because the people stuck in poverty will actually get hurt the most by this shit. Though CO2 emissions is, if you ask me, a bit of a question mark due to that.
The debt limit is incredibly hypocritical, and paired with the tax breaks from the rich its like a libertarian form of feudalism, as far as that can even make sense. Paired with the rest of the bill it's a reverse Robin Hood. The fact that the dollar's dominance, de facto primacy, position of trade in the world might get shaken up more as it was already weakened due to the chaos around tariffs is not something to be taken lightly. But I don't think I have the expertise to go further into that without making irresponsible guesswork out of this comment.
All in all. I don't know how quickly these effects that I personally think will happen go into effect, but I don't think it's going to be pretty. People in poverty may need to resort to criminal acts to survive, the rich get richer in an economically unsustainable way, and so many things are just a recipe for political violence.
Disgusting is the only word I have for it, but I don't think it's severe enough. I don't know if I have a word that's enough for this.
Libertarianism is, best I can tell, a feudalistic mindset. Unrestricted markets with strong property rights. The wealthy hire mercenaries and laborors whom are "acting of their own free will," as if they would have any other options to not starve.
This is intentional, of that I have no doubt. It's easier to declare martial law when the violence is distributed and real, and not just a highly curated "crisis" in a tiny corner of LA.
Other words I'd use to descibe the bill include reprehensible, deplorable, and straight-up evil.
What about that is feudalistic? Feudalism has a definition, it doesn’t just mean “backwards”. Feudalism was a specific social framework fundamentally orienting around the inability for any given power to centralize authority over an area, thus requiring a decentralized system of patronage between warrior-leaders.
Even by the late medieval period, feudalism began to wither as absolute monarchs like the sun king managed to consolidate power and standing armies began to form.
Is that not exactly what would occur in a pure libertarian government? There would be fiefdoms based on land ownership with little to no central authority.
The only distinction would be that the decentralization would be intentional.
No. For one, there needs to be a lack of military authority. That is, no one can successfully establish a monopoly on violence. In that scenario, the companies exist under the umbrella of a government with a monopoly on violence.
Second, is that there needs to be continual layers. Within a “fief”, in an actual feudal system, the lord still doesn’t have centralized authority, and as a result they need patronage systems with lesser warlords. It’s turtles all the way down.
Third, feudalism is very much a breakdown of the technology of administration. Why would these companies not be able to absorb their enemies? Did we forget what excel is?
It's not a single word, but I think Noam Chomsky summed it up best when he described the Republican party as "the most dangerous organization in human history."
The wealth transfer, the cuts to the social safety net, and the insane ICE funding are all heinous policies that will lead to unspeakable terror and cruelty on the domestic level, but the intentional worsening of climate change still takes the cake imo. Avoiding 1.5-2C was already going to be a longshot, but now we're adding another massive hurdle by cutting green energy in favor of fossil fuels. It's madness. It's become quite clear that Republican climate policy is to just live it up as best they can in the short term while they create a militarized nationalist police state to prepare for the inevitable flood of refugees in the future. It's as if someone screened Children of Men at the RNC and everyone said, "Yeah, let's do that."
Coincidentally, we're currently seeing a small example of the domestic consequences that come from Republican hostility to science and climate-related disaster prevention in the Texas flooding. It's only going to get worse.
The ICE funding strikes me as the scariest part.
The rest is unhinged, vicious cruelty too - but in the bureaucratic, political way we’ve come to expect, even if this round is turned up to a level far beyond what we’ve seen before. It’s the kind of indirect killing that people seem to have trouble correctly identifying and placing blame for, the same as when Trump was handling COVID.
But funding ICE to the level of a major global military force is something fundamentally new. That’s an unaccountable, unidentifiable army with no long-serving officers or historical tradition to give them pause, and they’re pointed inwards. Scaling that organisation to that level means that people aren’t just going to be dying quiet deaths of deprivation, separated from the cause through anonymous paperwork; people are going to be dying at the barrel of a gun, held by masked government agents. And I can’t see a world in which that funding number suggests anything other than a whole lot of people being intended targets.
It won't have the same global impact as climate policy, but for Americans and people living in the US, the ICE funding should be the scariest thing. When you combine ICE with the immense power of the NSA's spying capabilities and the massive right-wing propaganda network, the possibilities are truly disturbing.
It didn't take long for Republicans to blow past the justification of targeting "violent criminals" and move toward regular people. Then you have Mahmoud Khalil, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and others who were targeted the same way, who seem like a test run for what the Trump administration can and can't get away with. Right now it appears as though there are some limits, but I don't know what would happen if they tried again at a greater scale. The only thing that saved Khalil and Abrego Garcia was the intense public scrutiny. For all we know, there could be dozens (if not hundreds) of Abrego Garcias out there right now, and the media isn't capable of maintaining the necessary focus for an extended period of time. On top of all that, the Trump administration seems set on pursuing denaturalizaton, and has floated the idea of targeting political adversaries. We've officially entered gestapo territory in terms of their capabilities.
It looks like I'm no longer able to mark this exemplary; I suppose I've been marked 'noise' too many times or something. It deserves an 'exemplary,' though. We are six months in.
I believe if you’ve given out exemplary labels as super upvotes for arguing parties in ways that Deimos doesn’t like you lose the ability.
Ah I didn't know that, makes sense though.
Sounds right. I haven't been commenting in the even handed style that is the preferred mode here.
I gave an exemplary on your behalf. You can only give one every 8 hours, so if this is your second in that time it wouldn't work.
I haven't been able to give one all week.
Oh that is odd. Not sure what's going on there, Deimos would know best but I hesitate to @ him because he's super busy. Maybe send him a DM?
Besides the harm to impoverished Americans, what’s sad is the naked hypocrisy. Not that there’s anything new there. The party that cares so much about the national debt could have just hurt the poor to reduce spending. But they needed to balance a trillion in social service cuts with a trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy.
If they’re willing to make such extreme moves then they could have easily made the cuts and raised taxes and we’d be well on our way to resolving the deficit. But like everything they claim to be worried about when a Democrat is in the White House, it’s just noise.
One of the most important parts of this whole bill is how this is a huge generational shift of wealth:
How the record cuts coming to Medicaid could devastate California health care SF Chronicle
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Still, there is a lot of wealth in California and I would like to see an effort made here, probably including a tax increase to raise funds. I suppose it's too early to know what California is going to do?
Summary: In keeping with tradition, current Republican administration takes a growing economy inherited from previous Democrat administration, and runs it into the ground... Screwing over anyone not worth at least $10M in the process.
Lame that the deregulation of suppressors didn't make it in, but removing the $200 tax is neat. A lot of "gun rights" groups seem to think it opens the door for a lawsuit to dismantle what's left of the NFA though, so maybe there's hope
I'm with you, this is a little candle in the otherwise bleak darkness of the big dumb bill and the 2025 world landscape in general. I'm also seeing that SBRs and SBSes will have the $200 stamp dropped to $0. Don't know how it works to get ahold of anything like that though, I imagine it's still an onerous process even if it will no longer be so expensive.