Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"--Salvation or Disaster? Neither or both?

Richard C. Cook comments: The Trump administration has taken time out from its endless wars abroad to celebrate Independence Day here at home by President Trump’s signing of his “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) to keep the government running for another year and to implement his MAGA priorities.

Depending on who is commenting, the BBB is an occasion for national salvation, unmitigated national disaster, or neither, or both. What is certain is that the nation has not been separated by such ideological and partisan divides since, perhaps, the Civil War. Thus many affirm that we are now in fact in the midst of a second such Civil War.

Rather than write a dissertation on the BBB and its possible effects, I will mention just a few. But first here are four articles expressing what is in the BBB and why the authors approve or disapprove.

First is an expression of unbridled glee by a Trump supporter who spells out in simple language why and how the nation is about to be saved. The benefit of this account is that the actual effects of the bill, especially pertaining to immigrants, are not obfuscated by dense and misleading rhetoric. The author admits upfront that the bill is a massive manifestation of Keynesian pump-priming by the federal government though she says nothing about how and when the added indebtedness will ever be paid off.

Gabriel's Diary: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: The Economic Jumpstart America Needs

The second is by attorney Jeff Childers in his C&C News Substack where he makes the argument that the controversial cuts in Medicaid and other benefits for lower-income people will mainly affect illegal immigrants or will restore responsibility for Medicaid to the states, where it originally belonged. You can be the judge of that. Childers also makes it clear that for the plan to succeed, the Federal Reserve must lower interest rates. Thus far Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has resisted pressure from Trump to comply.

☕️ COMPLICATIONS ☙ Saturday, July 5, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Anyone who has been following the debate over the BBB is familiar with Senator Bernie Sanders’ steadfast opposition to what he considers a huge partisan attack on working people. Following is his Senate statement.

PREPARED REMARKS: Sanders on the Worst Bill in Modern U.S. History

Elon Musk, Trump’s erstwhile DOGE hatchet-man, says the BBB is “utterly insane and destructive,” that it will “destroy millions of jobs in America” and that “it gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” Focusing on the projected $5 trillion increase in the federal deficit, Musk says the BBB would be “political suicide for the Republican Party.” Musk has also threatened to start a new political party of his own called the America Party, even though, being foreign-born, Musk himself could never run for president. See the following article from The Guardian.

Elon Musk calls Trump’s big bill ‘utterly insane and destructive’ as Senate debates

My own view on the BBB is that it will change nothing fundamental in the life of the nation without a spiritual renewal leading to a greater level of virtue and healthy living by the population as a whole and a determination to resist the regime of endless war abroad and interminable debt at home. War and debt create and enrich a vicious monetary aristocracy that has driven the US into the ground over the past century and brought nothing but misery to the world and death and destruction to whole nations.

The BBB actually increases war spending to over a trillion dollars a year and runs up more debt to big global finance with the false promise of replacing taxes with revenue from new and higher tariffs. True, the US needs to reindustrialize, but the Trump administration has failed to spell out how this is to be accomplished except by throwing more money at the wealthy hedge funds, including the British ones, that own the US military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the needs of lower-income groups are being ignored, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out.

In fact, the cuts to health care border on genocide, a disaster which Trump has already implemented through his initial sponsorship of the COVID “plandemic.” Of course the BBB will result in gigantic windfalls to the already-rich, but that is not my idea of sane governance. What we really need is a major commitment to replacing the current bank-centered financial system with one the allows the federal government to finance its operations—and debt—through self-generated national currency. The government did this with the Civil War Greenbacks which kept the nation solvent for decades.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. He has recently been named a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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