Here’s How the Fiscal and Tax Policy of the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Will Redistribute Wealth to the Wealthy
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act represents an over 40-year march toward concentrating wealth among the wealthy and deepening the racial disparity under the guise of economic growth. In practice, it is a project of wealth consolidation, recycling the same logic that stripped Black communities of opportunity, blamed them for its consequences, and codified that inequality into law.
In today’s economy, wealth is not the reward for hard work or success, but the prerequisite for participating in it at all. From homeownership to higher education to entrepreneurship, the key components of wealth-building demand capital to access opportunity. Families without capital are kept in asset poverty, mired in debt, risk, and economic instability.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2021, the median wealth of white households was $250,400, while Black households were only $24,520, approximately one-tenth of their white counterparts. Ignoring that Black Americans were systematically denied the chance to build wealth even as their labor fueled the nation’s prosperity, lawmakers continue to blame individuals for outcomes shaped by generations of exclusion. This fuels a narrative that punishes people for lacking assets they were never allowed to accumulate, deliberately erasing the impact of entrenched structural racism.
This narrative — and the policies that sustain it — were entrenched in the 1980s through tax cuts for the wealthy, widespread deregulation, and the collapse of manufacturing. Black workers, who had only recently gained access to union jobs and industrial stability through decades of civil rights struggle, were especially vulnerable to this shift. Reagan-era legislation, such as the Economic Recovery Tax Act, deep cuts to social programs, and rolling back protections for moderate to low-income workers, naturalized inequality and stripped the government of responsibility for correcting it.
Under this model, the economic disparity was framed as the outcome of personal failure and market logic, ignoring the policy choices that ended the rise of the American middle-class and prevented most African Americans from ever having middle-class wealth. Today, we are seeing a renewed embrace of the same logic that deepened the racial wealth divide in the past.
At the heart of the bill is a permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center and CBO projections, these changes will reduce federal revenue by $4.5 trillion, increase federal spending by $325 billion, and add $3.4 trillion to $4.1 trillion in deficits when accounting for interest costs over the next decades.
The Joint Center’s 2025 tax policy brief, reveals that although the typical Black household might see a temporary tax reduction, the vast majority of benefits accrue to the top 20 percent of earners — disproportionately white. Because Black households are less likely to hold high-income jobs or significant financial assets, they are structurally excluded from the bill’s long-term gains.
For example, taxpayers earning $50,000-$60,000 — a common level for Black households — would see a modest rate reduction from 9.1 percent to 7.5 percent by 2027. But by 2033, their tax rate is expected to rise to 10.3 percent. Meanwhile, households earning more than $200,000 would enjoy a $338 billion collective tax reduction by the same year, compared to only $12.9 billion for the middle-income group, according to the Joint Center.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” also touts populist-sounding incentives, such as “no tax on tips” and overtime. But analysis by the Center for American Progress reveals the tips deduction offers minimal relief to low-income workers. These incentives represent only a small fraction of the bill’s cost and do nothing to offset sweeping cuts to programs that actually support economic mobility.
PBS also reports that the bill is estimated to lead to a mass loss of access to Medicaid and slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), affecting millions. Consequently, the burden will fall on low-income families who rely on these supports for survival.
We must hold lawmakers responsible for years of policies that continue to shut the doors to the dream of American middle-class security and leave behind the racial inequality of the past. The country’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a project of consolidating wealth for the wealthy, cutting opportunity for the rest of America, and pushing the nation deeper into debt. Reversing course will require not only a sustained, populist approach, but a rejection of the false narrative that individuals are to blame for the consequences of exclusion. The sooner we name that lie, the sooner we can build something better.
