President trump has now had his way. His pet tax and spending cuts bill, which he called the big beautiful bill is now a law. The bill scraped through both houses with a one vote margin, showing the polarization this bill has caused. The bill is an embodiment of trump’s economics. A dream law for conservative neoliberals. Tax cuts, low welfare spending and high defense spending. The bill was a part of his campaign, and therefore as expected, he called it historic and theatrics like Air Force salutes were on display on its signing on the 249th Independence Day. Mandates are complex and any simple derivative is trivializing. Trump was supported by most of the rural, less educated and unemployed whites who supported his social conservativism but did not support this economics. But mandates do not speak for themselves. Early next year, the congressional elections are due and this law will be at the heart of them. The law provides for massive federal tax cuts, bent towards the rich and huge reductions in welfare spending like affordable health care, nutrition support and education. It allocates billions for walling Mexican border and building detention centers for hundreds of thousands. The reductions may be more than a trillion dollars What the bill claims is that it would leave more money with the people to spend and as they are better placed to spend it more wisely, which would in turn fuel the economy. What the bill ignores is that many don’t earn enough to support themselves and tax cuts would not benefit them and many earn much more than what they spend and tax cuts wouldn’t have them spending more. We live in an era of historical inequality. So much that it threatens the ideas of citizenship, public order and community. The enactment of the law is not an American or Trumpian phenomenon. It is a manifestation of a global phenomenon. We have similar populist despots taking over republics all around. As wealth concentrates it forms a global club of oligarchs and nations, states, communities become redundant. In what was a hard earned space, the post war governments introduced welfare states. The beveridge report of 1942 heralded the birth of welfare states across the globe and the threat of communism sustained it. It rebuilt the postwar and post colonial societies and made them productive and prosperous. The withdrawal of the welfare state, would undo this progress of humanity. The law also aims to heighten the tariff war and disrupt trade. The world economy is already facing an AI disruption, this may cause utter chaos. Countries like India would bear the brunt of both ends.
Undoing 80 years of progress
