Donald Trump and the Republican Party have moved forward with the One Big Beautiful Bill, despite controversy and its approval in the US Congress. This is even after taking into account warnings from the Congressional Budget Office and the impact it will have on Medicaid and SNAP, along with Social Security funding. Tax cuts, along with studies by Pew Research and the National Bureau of Economic Research, expose concerns about economic inequality in the US. Likewise, several Nobel Prize winners in Economics define this measure as the responsibility of the wealthy, in which 0.1% of households possess great fortunes compared to American workers. Read on to learn more.
“Republicans need to better market the One Big Beautiful Bill”
President Trump has lately argued that Republicans have to better market the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed along party lines at the begining of this summer, as both internal and external polling proposes the public does not support the sweeping legislative package.
At the same time the bill eliminates taxes on Social Security for part of the beneficiaries and temporarily takes out taxes on tips, the Congressional Budget Office projects that it might result in at least 34 million people losing access to Medicaid by 2034, with millions more awaited to lose access to SNAP benefits. At the same time, the bill makes permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans—prompting six Nobel Prize-winning economists to call it the biggest wealth transfer in American history.
Newly released polling from Pew Research set up that only 11 percent of voters hardly certified of the legislation, indicating that even among Trump’s base, the law is not well-liked. The White House’s offensive posture in trying to boost public support underlines that its internal numbers may reflect likely sentiments to the publicly available polling data, such as that published by Pew.
The superrich were paying a lower effective tax rate than the average worker
A brand new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research highlits that even before the law took effect, the 400 richest Americans were paying a lower effective tax rate than the average worker. It must be said that between 2018 and 2020, the effective tax rate for this group—representing the top 0.0002%—was 23.8%. By the time isolating the top 100 wealthiest earners, the rate dropped further to 22%. In the meantime, the coomon tax rate paid by the general population during the same time was 30%, and 45% for workers whose primary income comes from labor.
The paper’s findings advises that while the U.S. tax system takes into account progressive elements—where higher incomes are taxed at higher rates—it fails to properly tax income derived from wealth, such as capital gains. As a result, those who gain their income through labor end up paying an important larger share of their earnings in taxes than those whose wealth generates passive income. This disproportion underscores they way the current system places a heavier burden on working Americans than on the ultra-wealthy.
The state of income inequality in the United States in 2025
In the first quarter of 2025, the top 0.1 percent of households—almost 132,000 families—owned 13.8 percent of the nation’s total wealth. In dollar terms, that quantity to roughly $22.1 trillion. If divided evenly, each household in this group would hold close to $166 million.
In the meantime, during the same period, the bottom 50 percent of households—around 66 million families—owned just 2.5 percent of the wealth, or about $4 trillion. Split evenly, that comes out to arpund $60,606 per family.
This is the ongoing state of income inequality in the United States. By the time the bottom half of the population has complications for a foothold in the economy, the wealthiest families possess more money than they could spend in a lifetime.
