President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on tax cuts, energy deregulation, and border security is in many ways a repeat of past enormous GOP tax cuts for the wealthy — but there's something different about this one compared to recent similar bills, wrote Mike Konczal of the Economic Security Project.
Specifically, he wrote, the George W. Bush tax cuts, and Trump's own first major tax cut bill in 2017, cut taxes across the board, giving the overwhelming majority of savings to the highest-income earners but at least giving some small tax relief to lower-income Americans as well. This time, however, the bill raises taxes on the lowest-income earners, with the bottom quintile seeing their take-home pay fall by $1,000.
"Even though conservatives are still blowing out the deficit, this time they aren’t even bothering to bring everyone along," Konczal wrote. "Instead, those at the bottom are outright worse off. The cuts to spending programs, especially Medicaid and SNAP, are severe. Estimates suggest at least the bottom two quintiles, 40%+ of Americans, will experience a clear loss in income. This isn't a subtle debate over which basis to judge the proportionality of tax cuts: millions will simply have less money, even as the bill adds $3.8 trillion to the deficit."
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Moreover, this doesn't even factor in the effect of Trump's tariffs, which, even after he has eased off his most draconian plans, amount to a significant tax increase on purchasing goods and services, that will heavily impact lower-income households.
In essence, Konczal wrote, Republicans have brought back their obsession with what they call the "Lucky Duckies" — people who are so poor they don't pay income taxes, which in their view means they aren't contributing to society. Such lower-income people pay a much higher share of their income on things like sales taxes, and often struggle to afford basic necessities.
In 2002, amid the debate over Bush's tax cuts, following a conservative op-ed using the term, Konczal wrote, "'Lucky Ducky' became a meme ... popularized by the cartoonist Ruben Bolling. The notion that the bottom half of income earners were politically suspect because they paid no income taxes, and they needed to be paying more in taxes even as taxes came down for the top half, showed up from time to time, but was rarely spoken out loud outside conservative think tanks and private donor meetings."
This persisted in the GOP for a long time. Famously, Mitt Romney complained behind closed doors on a hot mic that he'd never be able to win the "47 percent" who don't pay income taxes, and it contributed to the failure of his 2012 presidential campaign. However, for many years, this attitude was less emphasized under Trump, who, at least in his rhetoric, glorified certain struggling working-class groups and sought to scapegoat their problems.
"I expected it to be buried in the Trump years, with his right-wing populism and appeals to working people," wrote Konczal. "But apparently not."