On June 24, Trump asked Congress to pass the “Big Beautiful Bill” before Independence Day. Trump shouted: “No one is allowed to take a vacation until there is a big beautiful bill on my desk.” The Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives are stepping up consultations and preparing to continue overtime deliberations over the weekend.
This bill of more than 1,000 pages aims to permanently extend the tax reduction policies passed by Trump in 2017. The draft also adds some tax reduction items proposed by Trump during the campaign, including tips, overtime wages and some tax exemptions for auto loans, and plans to provide low-income elderly people with a pre-tax deduction of up to $6,000.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the richest families will reduce taxes by $12,000 per year, while the lowest-income people may spend $1,600 more, and middle-class families can get reductions ranging from $500 to $1,500. The child tax credit is planned to be increased to $2,200 to $2,500, but support for low-income families is limited.
The Senate version of the “Great American Act” also includes a $40,000 cap on the state tax credit (SALT), which some Republican lawmakers have reservations about.
The new content of the bill also includes about $350 billion in new spending for Trump’s homeland security and immigration policies, including: recruiting 10,000 immigration enforcement officers (ICE), each with a $10,000 signing bonus; building 100,000 immigration detention beds, with the goal of deporting 1 million people a year; imposing a $1,000 application fee on asylum seekers; establishing a state-level law enforcement subsidy mechanism and federal judicial funding, with a total of more than $15 billion.
To partially offset the loss of tax cuts, the Republicans plan to significantly cut the social security policies expanded during the Obama and Biden eras.
CBO predicts that at least 10.9 million people will lose their health insurance qualifications and about 3 million people will lose food assistance.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill as a whole will increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over ten years. Republican senators tried to treat existing policies as the “current baseline” to ignore the cost of tax cuts, saying that the actual cost is only $441 billion.
