Tax Cuts and Control Grids: What the BBB Actually Does

More rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

I hadn’t planned to write in detail about the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” But after a spirited exchange with a friend - someone smart and well-meaning, who supports the bill enthusiastically - I realized the debate was worth unpacking, not just to clarify the bill’s substance but to highlight a deeper divide in how we interpret what legislation like this really means.

At first, I dismissed the bill reflexively, a move my friend took as proof of “legendary confirmation bias.” He might be right to call me biased but, if so, I’m biased against the ritual charades of bipartisan graft and against the performative politics that wrap consolidation of elite power in populist optics. We will return to this.

First, I am going to lay out his argument, steel-manned to the best of my ability, before laying out my argument for why I think he’s wrong.

He began his argument with a link that stated that the BBB retains $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in 2017 that would have expired if Congress failed to act, along with new cuts. This included allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year. To help offset the lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements including for some parents and older people, and a major rollback of green energy tax credits. The CBO estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.

My friend is happy that the bill passed: his taxes are already high and would have gone way up, while now they go down. He argues that the government instituted reforms to require all able bodied people to work at least 80 hours a month (volunteering counts) or else they get kicked off federal government benefits, and illegals also finally get kicked off - “these are obviously good things.” Many “immigrants” work under the table and pocket the cash and get the free benefits anyway, and this bill helps stop that. He’s not a fan of the deficit exploding higher, but it seems to him mainly due to extending the expiring tax cuts which benefit all “wagecucks” so “at least it’s spending/deficit for a good purpose.” He argues that this bill mostly helps working professionals (which my friend is) as the super rich already barely pay any taxes due to loopholes; therefore “tax cuts for wagecucks = good spending”. According to him the bill extends tax cuts to all and kicks “leeches” off government benefits programs, which is” 95% of its financial impact”, and “it’s a good thing.” While he agrees that “the big picture is the country is toast, this one is different and it helps taxpayers.” He also believes that the bill does not target rural whites - “it says it considers home equity [as disqualifying for Medicaid] if someone has more than $1 million equity in their home, which sounds very reasonable to me and if so, such a person is not poor; it says you have to rectify every 6 months, which sounds reasonable and there’s no “targeting” at all in that language - if anything it targets urban blacks who will never keep going through the process.” To be fair, he did state that the aspects pertaining to the expansion of the national security state were troubling. He argued that using AI to analyze the contents of the bill would be improper because AI tells the user what he wants to hear, therefore if the user has a bias against the bill then the AI will spin whatever it’s output is to deliver that result.

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My Response

Now, I don’t like when this friend and I clash on issues, as he has good intuition overall and he regularly makes points that I find important to wrestle with. In this case, though, I found his analysis lacking. Here’s why his argument fails once placed in historical and structural context.

First, from a big picture perspective, Congress is fundamentally incapable of passing a bill that benefits the public at the expense of the elites. It is fundamentally incapable of confirming cabinet appointees who are not corrupted. I have detailed both of these points before extensively, and I even broke down the Senate’s voting record and concluded only about 15% of the Senate could pass as even quasi-populist. The math is just absolutely brutal against populists in Congress no matter what they do. Kynosargas argued in 2019 that populists “winning” in a democracy is simply not possible, and he is correct. So my default assumption is that whatever Congress passes is going to be an abomination of massive proportions - it will have some nice name that hides the horrors underneath, which will be full of corruption and graft, dramatically increasing the deficit and the gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else, but it will be done in such a way as to be done with plausible deniability. There will be some drama and back and forth between a couple of pseudo-populist holdouts which will all be swept under the rug with the bill passing by a vote or two, with everyone in the opposing party voting no on it. That’s how this thing is done, how it’s been done for decades, and how it will likely continue to be done. So I don’t need to look at the contents of any particular Congressional bill to have expectations about what it will contain. Since 1971 when the U.S. took itself off the gold standard the gulf between rich and poor has increased massively, the national debt has increased parabolically, currently $37 trillion and growing rapidly, with debt to GDP ratio the highest ever - higher than even the peak of World War 2 - and we are now facing 20%+/year annual inflation overall despite official statistics (see insurance rates, car prices, food prices, health care prices etc.).

Furthermore, every time the CBO assesses the budget impact of a bill it always dramatically underestimates the fiscal impact when judged against actual outcomes. While the CBO is a nonpartisan entity that follows strict rules, its forecasting process contains structural blind spots. It often relies on overoptimistic economic assumptions about growth, tax revenue, and inflation. Here are some examples:

1. During the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts the CBO failed to anticipate how much revenue would ultimately be lost, projecting a far more modest impact than the $1.5 trillion shortfall that materialized over the decade.

2. Similarly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was projected in 2010 to reduce the deficit by $124 billion over ten years due to new taxes and penalties, but later estimates and real-world costs, particularly the expansion of Medicaid and underperformance of cost-control mechanisms, reversed this picture, contributing hundreds of billions more to the long-term deficit than initially expected.

3. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is another key case: the CBO estimated it would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years, assuming the expiration of many provisions in 2025. However, with ongoing political pressure to extend these cuts, the actual cost is likely to exceed $2.3 trillion, according to projections by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

4. Most recently, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was scored as reducing the deficit by over $300 billion, primarily through new taxes and Medicare drug savings. Yet independent analyses like Goldman Sachs’ now estimate the climate-related tax credits alone may cost over $1.2 trillion, largely due to unexpectedly high corporate take-up and loose eligibility requirements.

Compounding the issue is the CBO’s use of static scoring (which doesn’t account for macroeconomic feedback), its reliance on assumptions about program uptake and implementation that often prove wrong, and Congress’s habitual use of sunset clauses or phase-ins to make programs look cheaper than they are, only to extend them later. Across these cases, the CBO’s projections serve more as procedural enablers for legislation than reliable fiscal forecasts.

So the macro picture of any Congressional bill is simply a horror show, and this history easily provides enough justification to write any bill enacted by Congress off without delving into the details. However, there are additional practical, moral and framing issues wrong with his arguments, along with problems associated with his details. Let’s continue this analysis.

Practical Issues

Even on the surface, the tax relief narrative deserves scrutiny. What’s never addressed is whether they’re clawed back through inflation, or whether their benefits are offset by reductions in public goods. Wages stagnate while asset prices soar as the national debt increases parabolically, so any “tax cut” to a working professional may vanish in higher rent, insurance, or healthcare premiums. Deficit-funded tax relief is a sugar high with a compound interest hangover.

Moral Issues

The moral reason why his analysis is wrong is because he equates welfare users with “welfare leeches.” There is certainly a large element of welfare fraud by illegals and those not working, and I agree the safety net should only be offered to those who are actively trying to better their lives. However, the big picture is that the work force in the U.S. has been intentionally gutted by our elites; they obliterated the manufacturing industry and shipped most of those jobs off to China and elsewhere, and of the ones that remained they utilize policies that drain rural jobs to urban areas. They have imported tens of millions of illegals which prevent regular Americans from securing jobs, while millions of others are being automated into obsolescence by artificial intelligence. Inflation has made people desperately poorer as well, and giant multinational corporations are favored via special tax treatment and public policy at the expense of a small business owner. Anywhere you go in America there’s big box multinational stores and vast poverty. So to say that these people need to work 20 hours a week in order to qualify for Medicaid - well, what if they can’t find employment for 20 hours a week? Are they expected to simply starve? The carve-out exemptions are very narrow. One may apparently “volunteer” to qualify, but what that constitutes is unclear and will be determined by future regulations. The Medicaid cuts - phasing out provider taxes and imposing frequent eligibility checks - will disproportionately harm low-income Americans, especially rural whites in red states. These hospitals rely heavily on Medicaid reimbursements, and when eligibility shrinks or administrative churn increases disenrollment, they face shortfalls, service cuts, or even closure. The result is the unraveling of already fragile community infrastructure. Furthermore, my friend assuming that a $1 million home equity threshold and six-month recertification windows are reasonable ignores the reality of how these mechanisms function on the ground. The rural poor often lack reliable transportation, stable internet, or the time to navigate labyrinthine paperwork while working precarious jobs, if those jobs even exist. These recertification traps are engineered to create drop-offs, not ensure fairness. And the idea that someone with a $1M equity stake is automatically ‘not poor’ collapses under regional reality - in many red-state counties, elderly homeowners sitting on land value have no liquid income at all. The metrics reflect a paper logic, not lived hardship, so I don’t consider the failure to secure employment to merit the moral condemnation and cut-off the way my friend does.

Framing Issues

While the bill lowers taxes for working professionals, aspects of the bill should not be viewed in isolation but rather comprehensively based both on the purpose of these bills in the past (always to entrench oligarchy at the expense of the masses) and how provisions of the bill relate to each other. It is a 940 page bill, with the text available for review here, and I utilized artificial intelligence to analyze the full contents of the final bill. For clarity, I spot checked the following analysis a bit to double check that it is not telling me what I want to hear - which is very important for a tool prone to hallucinations and mirroring what a person whats to hear back at them - but I have not conducted a full self-analysis of the 940 page bill itself (nor do I plan to). It argued that a key component of the bill was the vast expansion of the national security state under the guise of immigration enforcement, which can be (and will be) turned against regular Americans down the road:

Having reviewed the full text of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” here’s what stands out from a structural perspective.

While it includes some symbolic nods to immigration enforcement and conservative priorities (work requirements for Medicaid, funding for Trump-era monuments, language tweaks on asylum), its deeper function is the acceleration of a national AI-powered control grid. Billions are funneled into surveillance infrastructure—biometrics, machine learning, predictive analytics—under the guise of border enforcement and fraud prevention. Palantir and similar contractors stand to benefit enormously. Medicaid cuts appear limited to non-working adults without dependents, mostly impacting poor whites in red states, but compliance is rewarded with federal carrots—especially if states integrate tech-driven monitoring. At the same time, the bill quietly limits flexibility for any state-level healthcare innovation not aligned with federal cost-control priorities.

What’s really being normalized here is the infrastructure for internal behavioral governance. The optics center on cracking down on illegals, but the architecture being built—black site-style detention, bulk AI purchasing, centralized data fusion—is modular. It’s not hard to imagine it turning inward. Whether or not mass deportations occur, the long-term legacy of this bill may be to hardwire surveillance and social scoring into the administrative nervous system, just as war on terror measures were used against citizens a decade later. A clever bait-and-switch: red meat optics outside, Palantir grid inside.

Highlights from the bill that support this view:

• $10.1B authorized for “Digital Enforcement Modernization,” including AI-driven biometric surveillance, facial recognition, and social graphing tools.

• Bulk DHS purchasing authority for behavioral prediction algorithms (likely to benefit Palantir, Anduril, and other contractors).

• $2.7B allocated for “Community Risk Monitoring” pilot programs, which incentivize local police departments to integrate with federal databases.

• ICE authorized to establish six new “Strategic Detention Complexes,” some in remote or ecologically sensitive areas (e.g., “Alligator Alcatraz”).

• Medicaid work requirements federally mandated for non-disabled adults without dependents, with waivers available only under strict conditions tied to federal tech integration.

• Capping of SALT deductions partially lifted, disproportionately benefitting blue-state upper middle class homeowners and redistributing tax burden from blue to red.

• Asylum reform reduced to a $100 filing fee, with built-in judicial discretion to waive it—no substantive change to asylum loopholes.

• Funding for “American Legacy Preservation Projects,” including Trump monument construction and civic architecture renovations in battleground states.

• Federal preemption clauses override state data sovereignty in any program receiving federal funding tied to enforcement or fraud detection.”

This is the Patriot Act playbook run back through the algorithm: use external threats to justify internal architecture, then wait for the next excuse to pivot that architecture against the citizens themselves.

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Conclusion

At root, my friend and I are not really debating the Big Beautiful Bill. Underneath the arguments themselves, we’re operating from fundamentally different metaphysical and political frameworks which shape what we notice, what we assume, and what we even consider morally relevant.

He begins from a pragmatic, technocratic frame. The world is broken but fixable; if people are working, following the rules, and not abusing the system, then policy should reward them and punish those who don’t. Tax cuts for workers are good and work requirements for government aid are fair. He sees the country as largely running on bad incentives, and legislation like the BBB as an overdue course correction - which is not perfect, but necessary to tilt the scales back toward responsibility and productivity. Abuse of welfare, especially by those who don’t want to work, represents a core moral failure.

My framing is darker and more structural. I see the system itself and not the people scraping by at its bottom as the problem. The elite class long ago hollowed out the productive base of this country, shipped jobs overseas, imported tens of millions of low-wage replacements, and then flooded the economy with inflation and surveillance infrastructure. In that context, means-testing Medicaid every six months or requiring low-income people to log 80 hours a month in a decimated labor market doesn’t strike me as fairness but rather cruelty disguised as accountability. I’m not defending the dysfunction or fraud that exists in the system, but my point is that the rot runs deeper and the boot is already on the neck of most these people. If the system were fair we could talk about tightening access, but it’s not - not remotely - and so such measures always fall hardest on those least able to navigate the bureaucracy.

Deeper than that, I view these bills not as imperfect attempts at reform but as ritual performances. Congress in my frame does not pass bills to help you, it passes bills to consolidate control, placate targeted demographics with optics and reward financial patrons through hidden subsidies. If a bill gives you a tax break with one hand it builds the apparatus to surveil and punish you with the other. And Trump is merely it’s frontman mascot, in place to sell the lies as best as possible to the public (the great anti-COVIDian Ian Smith, covered previously, agrees). My friend sees the surface while I am focused on the long arc.

So while we’re both trying to be honest, and while I value his input highly, we are not engaged in the same level of analysis here.

Thanks for reading.