By Ronald Brownstein / Bloomberg Opinion
The highest price for President Trump’s second-term plans will be paid by those who are not yet born.
Yes, it’s true that today’s lower- and middle-income families will shoulder a large share of the cost; and that’s what’s getting most of the attention as Republicans push through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget reconciliation plan that, for all Trump’s populist rhetoric, pursues a mostly conventional Republican approach. It offers a tax policy that rewards the affluent far more than working- or middle-class families and targets substantial spending reductions at programs that mostly benefit blue-collar households.
The respected budget model devised by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania forecasts that the combined result after about a decade will be to reduce incomes for families in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution, while showering the top 0.1 percent with more than $100,000 in annual benefits. (That calculation doesn’t even include the distributional impact of Trump’s potential tariffs, which would deepen the imbalance.)
But the generational implications are even larger. In Trump’s plan, “what you see clearly is a redistribution from the poor to the rich and from the unborn to [those] currently alive,” says Felix Reichling, a senior economist for the Penn/Wharton budget model.
The GOP budget directs its deepest spending cuts toward Medicaid and SNAP, formerly known as food stamps; one-fifth of the spending for Medicaid, and over two-fifths for SNAP, goes toward children. And while the tax cuts, of course, primarily benefit older people in their prime working years, it is younger generations — especially those not yet born — who will pay for them through bigger federal debts that could raise interest rates, destabilize bond markets and slow future economic growth.
As these factors intersect, the Penn/Wharton model projects that most young people alive today — except those in the lowest income bracket — will still come out ahead in their lifetime income from the tax and spending plan. But future Americans aren’t so fortunate: The model finds that all Americans who will be born into the bottom three quintiles of the income ladder over the next 20 years will lose more than they gain from the package.
The Republican budget plan isn’t oblivious to the needs of future generations. It includes a version of the “baby bonds” proposal popular in both parties that provides a $1,000 federal grant for all newborns into savings accounts that can be withdrawn for specified purposes once they turn 18. (House Republicans, inevitably, named these funds “Trump Accounts.”) But the Penn/Wharton model calculates that for most Americans not yet born, the benefits from those accounts (and from the bill’s tax cuts) will be overwhelmed by other provisions in the plan. With its tax cuts funded primarily by increasing debt, Reichling says, the plan is “taking resources from future generations and giving them to current generations.”
The same can be said about other pillars of Trump’s second-term agenda. On many fronts, he seems to be governing by the maxim in a memorable tequila ad: Tomorrow is overrated.
In the name of reducing short-term energy costs, Trump is eviscerating federal efforts to combat climate change. That will dim long-term prospects for future generations in two distinct respects. One is by exposing them to greater risks from extreme weather and disruptive climate shifts. The other is by sapping America’s ability to compete for the trillions expected to be spent worldwide through 2035 on clean energy infrastructure, which is already attracting nearly twice as much annual investment as fossil fuels. Revoking the federal tax incentives approved under President Biden to promote domestic clean-tech manufacturing amounts to ceding leadership to China “on the innovation and technologies that are going to drive the economy into the 22nd century,” says Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power, an environmental group.
Trump’s cuts to federal spending on basic scientific research are similarly shortsighted. One recent study concluded that the long-term returns in future economic growth from federal scientific research “are notably higher” than previously estimated. As with climate change and the federal debt, the full cost of these cutbacks will manifest only over time as the transmission belt from basic research to new industries (such as biotech, computing and communications) and new companies breaks down. “If we turn off that tap, sure you could go four years, you can maybe go eight years, but eventually the innovation drought comes,” Zach Brandon, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Madison, Wis., recently told me.
Trump’s cuts to basic medical research couple those economic risks with threats to progress against deadly diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Terminating federal health research grants today, as one medical school official recently put it, means that 10 or 20 years from now, “we won’t have this pipeline of amazing new drugs.”
The most important word in Trump’s political lexicon has always been again;as in Make America Great Again. It signals that his vision for America’s future revolves around recreating the past. (Never mind that it’s largely an imaginary past.) With that perspective, it’s not surprising that Trump shows so little interest in what his agenda may cost future generations. But he’s steering by looking through the rear-view mirror; which is as dangerous in public policy as it is on the highway.
Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for The Atlantic, The National Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
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