Big, Beautiful and Brutal: How the New Bill Codifies the War on the Poor

Nancy O'Brien Simpson

Photo: flickr.com by Гейдж Скидмор, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Дональд Трамп

The Gospel of Wealth: America’s Real Religion

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the United States was never ideologically a Christian nation. While Christian moralism was woven into the rhetoric of the founders and echoed through the centuries in public discourse, the lived faith of Jesus—centered on the poor, the meek, the outcast—is glaringly absent from our national ethos. Christ spoke of camels and needles and the perils of riches. America, on the other hand, worships success.

What the U.S. has always been, in practice, is a nation of Horatio Alger: a myth-based society built on rags-to-riches folklore, where the individual—always alone, always male—is praised for clawing his way upward, bootstraps in hand, toward the promised land of wealth. In reality, Alger’s heroes were fictional, and the ladder they supposedly climbed no longer exists for most Americans.

Today, economic mobility in the U.S. is lower than in most other advanced democracies. According to a landmark study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, only 7.5% of children born into the bottom income quintile make it to the top—down from 12% in the 1940s. In Denmark, a child’s future is far less tied to their parents’ income; the same goes for Canada, Germany, and even the United Kingdom.

This context makes the recent passage of what lawmakers have branded the “Big Beautiful Bill” not only disingenuous but dystopian. It represents a full-throated embrace of an Ayn Randian worldview: a survival-of-the-richest doctrine where capitalism is no longer a market system but a moral hierarchy.

The bill slashes Medicaid by an estimated $1.3 trillion over the next decade, affecting more than 90 million Americans—nearly one-third of the country—who rely on it for basic healthcare. It guts federal investment in clean energy and climate resilience at a time when the planet is breaking temperature records year after year. June 2024 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, and yet the bill dismantles climate initiatives with breathtaking indifference.

At the same time, it cements permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The top 1%—who already own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined—stand to gain an average of $200,000 annually from the bill’s tax provisions, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Meanwhile, private prison corporations, which have quietly become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington, are big winners. The bill earmarks billions for ICE and detention facilities, despite growing international condemnation of human rights abuses in immigrant detention. In fiscal terms, ICE's 2025 budget is now larger than the GDP of more than 70 countries—including nations like Iceland, El Salvador, and Montenegro.

This is not the accidental drift of policy. This is a clarion declaration: the poor are expendable. The vulnerable are inconvenient. The earth itself—our shared inheritance—is negotiable if the check is large enough.

The mythology that the poor simply “didn’t try hard enough” continues to haunt American politics. But poverty in this country is rarely a failure of effort. It is far more often a failure of policy, of justice, of compassion. Over 60% of Americans living in poverty are employed. Many work multiple jobs and still cannot afford basic necessities like rent or insulin. One in four U.S. children lives in food-insecure households. In the richest country in the world.

The gilded persona of Trump

Donald Trump, whose gilded persona is the apotheosis of this capitalist theology, took the oath of office in 2017 with five billionaires standing behind him—a visual tableau of oligarchy that should have made every civics teacher in America wince. It was not the Sermon on the Mount. It was not even Lincoln at Gettysburg. It was a boardroom.

And that, perhaps, is the truth we must finally confront. America's civic religion is not Christianity. It is capitalism—unyielding, predatory, and dressed up in the language of freedom.

There is still time to resist this descent. There is still time to remember that a nation is not great because its billionaires are comfortable but because its children are fed, its elders are safe, and its planet is protected. Until then, the Gospel of Wealth will continue to reign, and the poor will continue to be told they simply didn’t try hard enough.