And it’s behind a paywall. Chef’s kiss.
The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History
House Republicans voted to advance a bill that would offer lavish tax cuts for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor. By Jonathan Chait House Speaker Mike Johnson Kevin Dietsch / Getty May 22, 2025, 9:21 AM ET
House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.
That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The “big, beautiful bill” would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, warned that the bill’s passage, by a 215–214 margin, would mark the moment the Republicans ensured the loss of their majority in the midterm elections. That may be so. But the Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact.
The minority party always complains that the majority is “jamming through” major legislation, however deliberate the process may be. (During the year-long debate over the Affordable Care Act, Republicans farcically bemoaned the “rushed” process that consumed months of public hearings.) In this case, however, the indictment is undeniable. The House cemented the bill’s majority support with a series of last-minute changes whose effects have not been digested. The Congressional Budget Office has not even had time to calculate how many millions of Americans would lose health insurance, nor by how many trillions of dollars the deficit would increase.
The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.
House Republicans are fully aware of the political and economic risks of this endeavor. Cutting taxes for the affluent is unpopular, and cutting Medicaid is even more so. That is why, instead of proudly proclaiming what the bill will accomplish, they are pretending it will do neither. House Republicans spent months warning of the political dangers of cutting Medicaid, a program that many of their own constituents rely on. The party’s response is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program—when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings.
The less predictable dangers of their plan are macroeconomic. The bill spikes the deficit, largely because it devotes more money to lining the pockets of lawyers and CEOs than it saves by immiserating fast-food employees and ride-share drivers. Massive deficit spending is not always bad, and in some circumstances (emergencies, or recessions) it can be smart and responsible. In the middle of an economic expansion, with a large structural deficit already built into the budget, it is deeply irresponsible.
In recent years, deficit spending has been a political free ride. With interest rates high and rising, the situation has changed. Higher deficits oblige Washington to borrow more money, which can force it to pay investors higher interest rates to take on its debt, which in turn increases the deficit even more, as interest payments (now approaching $1 trillion a year) swell. The market could absorb a new equilibrium with a higher deficit, but that resolution is hardly assured. The compounding effect of higher debt leading to higher interest rates leading to higher debt can spin out of control.
House Republicans have made clear they are aware of both the political and the economic dangers of their plan, because in the recent past, they have repeatedly warned about both. Their willingness to take them on is a measure of their profound commitment.
And while the content of their beliefs can be questioned, the seriousness of their purpose cannot. Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.
By reading this, i had two thoughts:
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Someday soon, America will burn.
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The rest of the world should make a Blacklist of all those criminals who are robbing the working class so they cannot go anywhere exept from burning in the hell they created.
- Someday soon, America will burn.
I think about this almost daily. I have young kids and I’m terrified of the world they are growing into.
#2 so that Americans can claw back all the money they stole before they can flee.
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It also has a bit where judges cant hold people in contempt anymore.
Wow. Fuck these republicans and fuck the people that voted for them
Hakeem Jeffries and anyone else thinking we are ever going to have fair elections again are Fing morons.
The spiraling deficit will just be something they ultimately blame the democrats for. The rubes will lap it up and vote them in again.
Disable JavaScript to bypass.
Huh. I haven’t heard this tip. Does this work with most paywalls?
Only with stupid ones.
In my experience, Yes. Websites tend to execute too much of their site in JavaScript. The paywall part is no exception.
Our country is being robbed, our futures stolen
The floodwaters can only be dammed so long before breaking free. Whether that happens via controlled release of pressure or a disastrous blow out is up to the people with the regulatory power. Their failure to address the tide can only end in their painful ruin. For their sake, they better have fast legs if they don’t grow some hearts.
It’s less that the regulators are failing to do their jobs and more that regulators are being given toddlers’ first toolset to do the job that requires some high end tools.
Sorry, my intent was to apply the label of “regulator” to the publicly elected officials and ghouls controlling the course of this legislation (i.e. regulating society). I are engineer, so sometimes I mix my lingo and analogies.
Not me, never had a future.
Of course, this is going to affect the working class first and worst. But stay with me here.
My wife and I are what you’d call upper middle class. Thanks to our college education, union jobs in public agencies, and mostly being smart with money, our assets are not meager.
Are you like me? Don’t think you’re exempt. They’re coming for our assets too. They want all of us living paycheck to paycheck, begging our employers to not fire us.
What I’m saying is, the class struggle is everyone’s struggle. If you’re not a billionaire, you’re at risk. Act like it.
The #1 issue for all of us is Us versus Them. That’s it. There’s 1000 of them and 350 million of us.
It is, but the narrative they want it “us vs immigrants”. Think of how long they’ve been rage baiting people with this, it’s nuts.
Keep focus, it’s the 1%.
Exactly. I don’t think I am poor but in there eyes, I am dirt poor. Anyone can’t afford a seat at their table are at peril.
I really want this to be it. I want a big enough mass of freak conservative boomers to die off of old age and for the republicans to finally push everyone else hard enough that this country finally fucking snaps and swings left so hard that Reagan’s grave belches black smoke for a month. I hope we swing left so hard that all the Fox News assholes run bawling off to Russia, all the neoliberal dickheads move to their neoliberal paradise of [some offshore oil rig], and we end up fixing all kinds of shit that’s been broken for basically my entire life.
I know it won’t; we’ll just get a bunch of working class republicans standing around the wreckage and mumbling “can you imagine how much worse it would have been under Biden?” to each other.
I want a big enough mass of freak conservative boomers to die off of old age and for the republicans to finally push everyone else hard enough that this country finally fucking snaps and swings left so hard that Reagan’s grave belches black smoke for a month.
Look at Mike Johnson’s face–he’s not dying for a long long time. Get over the idea that evil people are all old and you just need to wait for them to die, it’s not going to happen. New evil ones are born every day, they exist in every generation, they’ve been with us forever and will be with us forever.
J.D. Vance is only 40.
Theres an evil motherfucker born every minute
Apparently young people aren’t going to save us. Young men are farther right than the previous generation. Boomers aren’t listening to Joe Rogan.
Idk, it’s easy to get depressed about it, but I think that there’s another interpretation. It shows that Gen Z recognizes how fucked everything is, and recognize the urgent need for drastic change, which is what Donald promises, even if he’s a colossal piece of shit and the changes he promises are pure grift. Yeah, they’ve been taken in by the right, but only because the right has seized on the populist moment while the institutional left is still fretting about decorum, rank, seniority, process, and literally anything else before results. If the left gets out there and starts swinging for the fences, I think we can turn things around. So, of course, the democrats are preparing to rise to the occasion by offering Gavin Newsom and his plan to build the biggest bulldozers on earth for bulldozing the homeless.
I think this is part of why Bernie was yelling at people to run for office. We need more options, more people who are willing to turn their back on the establishment, on the left.
Hey, yanks, until your centre right party (the Democrats) is willing to go all in and run candidates at all levels of government on the slogan of “The Largest Downward Transfer of Wealth in American History”, your far right party (the Republicans) will keep repeating this. But if it makes you feel better, go back to blaming Muslims in Michigan or whatever.
The swing voters in the US is dumb as a brick.
They care a lot more about “culture war” issues.
“Swing Voter” == “Too Embarrassed To Admit Being A Republican”
So make “tax the rich” a culture war thing. Left populism is a winning strategy too.
How? The largest campaign that ever occurred for taxing the rich was occuring by AOC and Bernie around the U.S. The media will air something about Trump taking a green shit after drinking a blue slupee far more. It doesn’t matter until they switch the notion to something that threatens the media and their families lives more than likely. They own the media.
Don’t ask me, a random guy on the internet. Ask your elected representatives, your intellectuals, your think tanks. Your civil society, man, not some random Canadian online.
Left populism is a winning strategy too.
Not if its surpressed in (social) media, unfortunately.
As horrific as it sounds, the US very much needs a ‘Democrat Trump.’ But even that can’t happen in the current media environment. There are all sorts of proposals to address that, but the problem seems to be that people can’t help themselves and keep using Twitter, watching Fox, stay glued to Facebook or whatever.
Trump used to run as a democrat, so we already have that.
Don’t hate the 1%, hate the gays!
The largest upward transfer of wealth in history… so far.
Not counting the ones during Covid or 2008.
Everyone seems to forget the Libor scam/conspiracy. Trillions.
The French public would have a called a general strike at minimum while the AmeriKans take it in the ass.
To be fair the French complain about their access to stolen modern day African money
did you know that protesting is not legal in many places in the US and also the police like to just murder people randomly
Because these two countries are otherwise identical in every way. Good thing you have an easy solution that still works in spite of the existence of assault rifles and wire taps
Not exactly.
The American political system turned into a gaggle of Mafias some time ago, France isn’t quite there yet.
I mean it’s pretty much been that the whole time… Idk I guess I’m just tired of people saying basically “Well here’s an obvious solution that you clearly missed because you’re automatically lazy and/or stupid if you’re from the US, and especially if you don’t have the financial solubility or high-demand skills to easily expatriate or you’re disabled, just get up off your lazy corn-fattened ass and go yell at the people who give the US military their orders. Oh, you say you tried and nothing happened? You must have been an utter and complete failure. You deserve this then.”
Not that that’s what is being said precisely, but it hits the same notes. And DicJacobus, this isn’t aimed at you, but at the original comment in this thread. Unless you agreed with them and I misread your tone
So far
The French solution
Trickles down on the rich.
Guess I’ll give up on everything, not have any kids and shoot myself at age 60,… unironically. I have the gun already.
This is not end of the world, history is full of bad moments and we got out of them.
We need people to join protests to help change things, not kill themselves. If we accept that we have no power, we will have no power.
Are we beyond the point of protests yet? Our politicians are actively taking affirmative steps to avoid listening to them.
We have been far past that point for a long while but nobody cares.
Peaceful weekend protests might make people feel like they’re doing something but are not successful. You have to disrupt the economy for people to notice general strikes massive protests.
Oh I will, all the way up to age 60. I’m not going to wait quietly for old age. I have lots of time to flick off conservatives.
But do I actually have any hope at all?
nope!
Our problem is apathy. It is much more of us than them.
If we succeed and still have democracy the laws can be reverted, but as I mentioned the apathy is the biggest problem and the reason how we got where we are.
That is such a funny fucking joke you made there old buddy old pal. “We got out of them” no we didn’t you fool do you see where we are now?? This has been a build up of events that have happened before. Ignoring that is just plain ignorant and dangerous to the situation at hand, we got here because we never truly “got out of them”.
By all means fight the good fight and keep your friends, families, and neighbors safe. However, we need to stop placating people with this rhetoric.
You could do so much more good with that gun.
That’s most millenial Americans’ retirement plans.
I hope they consider overdosing on opiates insteady. Put to sleep, probably the only way I’ll know true peace
I have given up on the idea of retirement or security/safety in my lifetime a loooong time back. We live in the worst possible type of dystopia, a world where “evil” won long ago, and has had ample time and opportunity to sink its claws into every aspect of our lives, forever.
And the worst part is that most people won’t even believe it. In fact, almost a majority seem to relish it somehow. Like they want the world to be as terrible as it can possibly be, even for themselves.
And their kids. I couldn’t imagine setting them up for life like this. Then again perhaps they dont really care about them beyond having the “reproduce” achievement unlocked.
My personal take is that the super-elite know there’s no saving our biosphere in our lifetimes so they’re just robbing what they can while they still can.
If your mental health is in that kind of state, please get rid of the gun. The world is better with you here, and we need each other the fight that’s coming.
And if we need guns later, I’m a hobbyist that’s been collecting them for years and I’ve got a TON of them.
The world is better with you here
I can’t imagine any 100lb bag of rice being worse off because one grain is missing.
Grains of rice don’t live, don’t love, don’t build relationships and societies with each other. People do.
Take your ice cream koan elsewhere.
It’s your life, but you cant predict the future. Maybe there is a chance things work out and you get to a better place in life?
You’re not the only one, though.
Considering the entire history of the US is one big upwards transfer of wealth, that is really saying something.
So far
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For republicans, “wealth transfer” is a dirty phrase if used in any shape or form that leans towards fairness, a level playing field, and equality. However, handing money to the already wealthy and fuck everyone else is perfectly acceptable wealth transfer.
Well they have all been promised since the Reagan era that it would all trickle back down. I’m sure it will start doing that any day now.
