Three incredible what-ifs, one right after the other, underscore the direction of America's tax code over the last several decades. They appear early on in the 2021 book Tax the Rich! How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer.
Shock after shock, here they come:
"If you had worked every single day from the time Columbus sailed to America to the present and earned $5,000 per day, you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week."
"If you had made $100,000 every single day since the year 1 A.D. and saved every penny, you would still have less money than Bill Gates has."
"If you had started working when the human race, Home sapiens, first walked upright, around 200,000 thousand years ago, and saved $100,000 a year, you would still not have as much money as Mark Zuckerberg has."
All three are not only true, they're super-true: The totals for the "if" dollars fall far short of the totals for the actual dollars pulled in by Zuckerberg, Gates and Bezos. Now comes David Kamin of NYU with a real-world parsing of the numbers, factoring in the ongoing effects of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill and his first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. As Kamin sees it, the sirens are already sounding.
Listen to a key paragraph from his special report in November's Tax Notes:
"This report begins to define the magnitude of the challenge ahead. It describes how the political patterns followed over the last several decades could mean the triumph of a more regressive and unfair vision for (our) tax and fiscal system relative to what seemed achievable just a few years ago-- and with attendant harm to millions of low- to middle-income Americans who would bear greater fiscal burdens as a result."
Some of those burdens stem from the 2025 bill's "significant reductions in healthcare, nutrition assistance, student aid and clean energy subsidies." Putting everything together, America is heading into the future with a double-whammy tax code-- a code that tilts even more toward the rich, and saves its stinginess and takeaways for everybody else. As a percentage of their income, the poorest 20% will take the biggest hit from this year's bill.
Estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) show just how skewed the legislation is: "Over the next decade, (the bill) will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year." CBO and JCT estimates also show the bill driving up the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years.
The last of the One Big Beautiful Bill's 100-plus provisions won't take effect for another decade. It's called "Delayed implementation of new regulations that protect student loan borrowers," words that identify a small minority of the millions certain to be harmed.
Republicans supported the bill almost unanimously. Conversely, every Democrat in both the House and the Senate voted against it. Here's a look at one of the worst provisions of a bill that ended up getting 266 Republican "ayes" and 257 Democratic "nays".
As recently as 2017, the estate tax exemption for a married couple was just under $11 million. The 2017 Trump tax bill more than doubled that amount, and his One Big Beautiful Bill puts the exemption at its highest level ever. It will rise to $30 million for a couple in 2026-- a near tripling of the estate tax exemption by the two Trump administrations, all benefiting the wealthy at the expense of everybody else. The numbers mean that the largest untaxed fortunes in American history will now pass from one generation to the next (or, putting it the other way around, the federal government will receive not a penny in tax revenues when those fortunes pass to their heirs).
As if it weren't enough to cut taxes going forward, the bill also includes a last-minute $16 billion corporate giveaway retroactive to January 16 of 2025. It allows companies to deduct asset costs immediately rather than over their lifetime. News of its possible passage incensed Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: "The last thing American families need is a tax code rigged even more for billionaires and billionaire corporations."
In the end, America didn't get One Big Beautiful Bill. Just as Warren feared, what America really got was One Big Ugly Bill.
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This article first appeared in The New York Daily News.
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