Just yesterday, as Americans across the nation celebrated their country’s 249th birthday, President Trump signed an 870 page tax bill into law. While the bill increased the budget for the defense department and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by more than 250 billion dollars, according to BBC, it also made large cuts to core government aid programs such as Medicaid. And even though President Trump reassured the public that this bill would neither reduce Medicaid’s potency nor hike up tax rates, the bill remained contentious in Congress, barely passing in the Senate vote earlier this week, with Vice President JD Vance required to cast a tiebreaking vote. However, now that the bill has passed, the same question remains: will Trump’s tax bill actually improve the economic state in America, or was economic improvement simply a façade to fund Trump’s plans to bolster the military and increase deportation?

Currently, there are numerous reasons to believe that the latter answer is true. First of all, while the Trump Administration claimed that the bill would “reduce [economic] deficits by over $2 trillion,” the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates predict the exact opposite, forecasting that the bill in its current state will add more than 3 trillion dollars of debt for the American government in the next ten years. A large part of the CBO’s prediction involves the eventual tax increase for people making less than $30,000 a year, while a tax decrease by more than $300,000 annually for the 0.1% of people in America.  Simply using logic, these 2029 tax changes would not decrease the amount of money the government receives from taxes, but it would also disproportionately harm the families and people barely wavering over the poverty line while aiding the uber-rich.

Moreover, Trump’s tax bill may very well both ruin Medicaid benefits for millions of people while unnecessarily increasing deportation in America. Despite the President’s reassurance that “Medicaid [was] left alone,” the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent healthcare research center, predicts that about half of the 2 trillion dollars Trump expected to cut with this bill is coming out of funding for Medicaid over the next 10 years. These budget cuts would directly harm Healthcare for people in America with limited income, but Trump asserts that the new bill will also root out “illegal aliens” who take up Medicaid budget, “protect[ing] Medicaid for the truly vulnerable.” This statement extends Trump’s list of different reasons to increase deportation, from the foreign tariffs and fentanyl rates of the past to the protection of government programs of the present. 

Regardless, Trump’s decisions since January have not seemed to make large positive impacts for the economy, as seen in the stock market crashes of April, and only time will tell if giving 100 billion dollars to ICE in the next 10 years will actually improve Medicaid for Americans. While many Americans are rejoicing in the return to Reagan-like policy, relishing tax “improvements” and Medicaid cuts, the other half of the nation waits nervously to see if this new bill will wreak havoc on not only the American economy but also its people.