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President Donald Trump’s budget bill would sap resources away from the poorest households in the U.S. while giving tens of thousands of dollars to the richest Americans on an annual basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found in a new analysis.
Last month, CBO reported that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” would decrease the wealth of the poorest 10 percent of households by 4 percent in coming years. In its newest analysis, CBO found that this would amount to a $1,600 average annual decrease for these families.
Meanwhile, the richest 10 percent of households would see their wealth increase by $12,000 yearly, or a 2.3 percent increase in resources through 2034, the analysis found.
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For all households in this category, this would represent a $168 billion increase in their collective wealth, amounting to 68 percent of the total net increases in wealth across all groups. The poorest Americans would see $23 billion taken from them under the bill.
In other words, the bill would represent a staggering and historic transfer of wealth from the poorest in the U.S. to the richest households — taking money away from the Americans who need it the most and giving it to those who need it the least.
The benefits for the richest 10 percent of households — or those with incomes over $170,000 per 2021 data — are stark in comparison to the effects on the rest of the population.
By comparison, those in the top 90th percentiles of incomes would see their wealth increase by roughly $3,300 a year, almost a quarter of the annual increases for the wealthiest households. Those in the middle, in the fifth decile, would see an increase of $500 a year. Those in the 30th percentiles and lower would all see their wealth decrease.
Republicans have criticized the CBO’s analyses of the bill by claiming that its estimates are simply incorrect.
However, numerous other analyses by independent groups have corroborated the CBO’s findings that the bill sacrifices the lives of the poor to benefit the wealthiest Americans. This is clear even from a simple factual analysis of the bill: Its primary proposals include lengthening Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and majorly slashing lifesaving anti-poverty programs like Medicaid.
In that way, the bill literally sacrifices the poor. According to an analysis by Yale University and University of Pennsylvania this month, the bill would, conservatively, lead to 51,000 excess deaths each year because of its cuts to health care.
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