The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act Will Make the U.S. More Unequal, Sicker, and Hungrier

By Liam Grima

July 21, 2025

On July 4th, 2025, President Donald Trump signed House Resolution 1 (H.R.1) – officially titled the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” Act (OBBB) – into law. The OBBB is a gargantuan tax and spending bill that fundamentally reshapes the United States’ (U.S.) economic landscape. Despite being portrayed as a “once-in-a-generation” effort to deliver “tax cuts and bigger paychecks” and “protect” healthcare, the OBBB will enrich the wealthy and harm both poor and low-income people across the country. As a result, oligarchy has been further weaved into the social fabric.

Greater Inequality

First, the OBBB will worsen economic inequality. By slashing income taxes for rich individuals, providing special deductions and loopholes for wealthy business owners, and exempting large portions of affluent estates from inheritance taxes, the richest 10% stand to receive 80% of the legislation’s total value. For example, by providing “pass-through entities” – such as LLCs, sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S-corporations – with a 23% tax deduction, some of the country’s richest businesses will make out like bandits. About 64% of this $740 billion tax cut will flow to people who earn more than $400,000 – with approximately 50% grabbed by the richest 1% alone. Another example is the OBBB’s effort to weaken the estate tax – a tool originally designed to reduce the hereditary advantage of aristocratic families who passively accumulate wealth.  By doubling the estate tax exemption, the OBBB will shower the wealthiest 0.08% with a $212 billion tax cut, widening the gap between wealthy dynasties across the country and the rest of society.

These provisions are particularly troubling in a country experiencing record levels of income and wealth inequality. Between 1980 and 2018, the top 1%’s share of national income doubled from 10% to 20%, while the bottom 50%’s share fell from 20% to 10%. This perverse trend has only continued and worsened. During this period, as tax rates on top incomes and corporations have declined more dramatically in the U.S. than in any other OECD country, income inequality also increased more precipitously than in any other OECD country. This is concerning given the established link between income inequality and psychosocial dysfunction. The long-term consequences of the OBBB will likely include decreasing life-expectancy, declining social trust and cohesion, elevated anxiety levels, and increased rates of illness.

Less Healthcare and Food for Poor and Low-Income People

Second, to partially offset the headline cost of the OBBB’s tax breaks for the wealthy, it will retrench the social safety net by cutting healthcare and nutrition assistance by nearly $1.3 trillion – the largest upward transfer of wealth ever packaged into a piece of legislation in U.S history. The bill’s three main victims are: Medicaid, extended premium tax credits, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Medicaid is a federal-state healthcare partnership in which the federal government sets general eligibility criteria and helps finance insurance provided by the states to low-income people. Over 70 million people are enrolled in Medicaid – with women, people of color, and other disadvantaged groups having a higher per capita enrollment. Premium healthcare tax credits, meanwhile, are an expanded subsidy for individuals who earn between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty line, are ineligible for Medicaid, and lack access to affordable employer-sponsored insurance. As for SNAP, it is a means-tested anti-hunger program that helps 42.1 million people better afford food – helping reduce food insecurity among recipients by approximately 30% and preventing 6.6 million people from falling below the poverty line.

Regarding Medicaid, the OBBB will reduce federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade – largely by adding work requirements and increasing reporting burdens. These changes would strip health insurance from approximately 11.8 million people. Moreover, by suspending extended premium tax credits, the OBBB will cause an additional 5.1 million people to lose their healthcare and leaving many others to face a projected 75% increase in their average out-of-pocket premium costs – at a time when Americans are spending more on healthcare than ever before. Research shows that being uninsured and cost barriers lead people to delay or forgo treatment and medications – decisions that can be debilitating or even fatal, as untreated illnesses and ailments progressively worsen. Since the OBBB will cause 17 million Americans to lose healthcare and others see skyrocketing costs, the OBBB will undoubtedly make the U.S. sicker and unhealthier – resulting in an additional 51,000 preventable deaths each year.

As if taking healthcare away from poor and low-income people to finance tax cuts for the rich isn’t enough, the OBBB will also reduce SNAP spending by 20% – roughly $186 billion – over the next decade. Mimicking its Medicaid strategy, the OBBB achieves these cuts by imposing stricter work requirements, shifting administrative expenses onto already budget constrained states, and introducing a graduated penalty system in which states with higher payment error rates must shoulder an increasing share of SNAP costs. Nearly 85% of SNAP payment errors result from overpayments – meaning the Trump administration and Republican caucus have opted to nickel-and-dime states that provide excess benefits to the poorest households, rather than do things such as clawing back the $150 billion in taxes that millionaires and billionaires avoid every year. These programmatic changes would cut SNAP enrollment by an estimated 2.9 million people, while leaving an additional 5 million beneficiaries at risk of losing some of their benefits. This is a recipe for suffering.

According to the Yale Budget Lab, the effects of the OBBB will be staggeringly regressive. For the bottom 40% of the population, the cuts to the safety net outweigh all of the tax cuts they are eligible for. In fact, over a ten-year period, the poorest quintile will experience an average 2.9% decline in adjusted gross income, while those in the second quintile percentiles will see a 0.4% decline. Meanwhile, those in the 95th to 99th percentile will benefit from a 2.5% increase in their adjusted gross income and the top 1% will enjoy a 1.9% gain. At the very top, the wealthiest 0.1% will see an average 1.4% increase. While this may be comparable to what people in the middle class will experience in relative terms, because the average per-capita income for the top 0.1% is roughly $4.5 million, this translates into large tax savings. For example, the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that individuals in the richest 0.1% will each receive an additional $301,550 in 2026 alone – approximately 211 and 76 times larger than those in the third and fourth quintile will receive.

Implications for the Ecozoic

As ecological economists Herman Daly and Josh Farley have shown, economic activity is not an objective or neutral process. Rather, it is fundamentally about “the allocation of limited, or scarce, resources among alternative, competing [desirable] ends.” As they emphasize, this definition inherently raises three implicitly ordered questions:

• Question 1: What desirable ends exist?

• Question 2: What resources are required to achieve these desirable ends?

• Question 3: Which desirable ends should receive resources, and how much?

These questions are not value-free – they are ultimately shaped by socially specified goals and normative judgments. In the case of the OBBB, the answers to these questions are revealing:

• Answer to Question 1: Cut taxes for the wealthiest segment of U.S. society

• Answer to Question 2: Trillions of dollars due to lost federal revenue.

• Answer to Question 3: $1.3 trillion diverted from public investments in healthcare and nutrition.

Being that the Ecozoic is an envisioned geological epoch defined by mutual flourishing among humans and between humanity and the broader Earth community, the OBBB is a transgression that contravenes the foundational Ecozoic goal of just distribution. It will make the U.S. more unequal, sicker, and hungrier, which is unjust and morally decadent. Those who helped pass it must be remembered and held accountable.

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Liam is a Master of Science student in the University of Vermont’s Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) department. Liam is both a funded research assistant through the CDAE program and the first MS student to become a fellow of the Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) project. As an MS student and L4E fellow, Liam is laying the groundwork for his pursuit of a doctoral degree in Sustainable Development, Policy, Economics, and Governance (SDPEG) at UVM. Broadly speaking, Liam is an aspiring ecological economist that is interested in the evolutionary dynamics of human cooperation at each scale of society - with a particular fascination with how social arrangements and cultural structures impact the ways societies produce, allocate, and consume raw materials and energy.

Liam’s work is inspired by a comment made by Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman: “Most people, deep down, are pretty decent.” Cooperation is humanity’s superpower that has allowed the species to conquer the globe - with both positive consequences and negative repercussions. When directed towards good, personally, without the kindness of others and his mentors - Dr. Joshua Farley, especially - Liam understands he would never be where he is. Thus, Liam’s work is truly about giving back and surfacing the good of humanity.