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Michael Moss
Foreign hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. July 5, 2025 Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000 page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill's deep unpopularity and Congress's lack of debate on it. When House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, presented Trump with the speaker's gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose. Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America's new golden age, speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the US government in the past six months. The measure makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy incorporations, which were due to expire at the end of this year, permanent. At the bill signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. He said, after this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically. In fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the non partisan Penn Wharton budget model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product, by 0.3% in 10 years and dropped the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame from 1981 to 2021. Tax cuts move more than $50 trillion a year from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect. Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year. Sam Goldfarb and Justin Lehart of the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that economists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the US Is binging on debt when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation's debt ceiling by about $5 trillion. The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981, the Republicans New law continues. The cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years and about 200 million dol 230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar while promoting fossil fuels. At the White House on Friday, Trump said, I just want you to know if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it's all a con job. He claimed the new law is the most popular bill ever signed. But it is clear administration officials are well aware that polls showed Americans disapproving of the measure more than approving. By the huge gap of around 20 points, they are now trying to sell the law to voters. Notably, the previously nonpartisan Social Security Administration sent an email to Social Security recipients yesterday claiming the bill eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Except the law does not actually eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it gives a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for individuals older than 65 with annual incomes less than $75,000, or $12,000 for married incomes less than $150,000. What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement, more than the military budgets of all but 15 countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE's annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE's annual budget. According to Aaron Reichland Melnick of the American Immigration Council, the law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and firearms and explosives, U.S. marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, Reichland Melnick told Democracy now, the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation. And now, with the MAGA Republican political realignment in place, we wait to see whether it delivers the golden age. Trump and his MAGA loyalists promise the early signs are not auspicious within hours of Trump signing the bill into law, Gun Owners of America and a number of other pro gun organizations filed a lawsuit claiming the measure makes the 1934 National Firearms act, or NFA, unconstitutional. That law regulated machine guns and short barreled guns by imposing a tax on them and making owners register their weapons. The Supreme Court upheld that law as a tax law. The budget reconciliation bill ended those taxes and thus the plaintiff's claim the constitutional justification for the law. In a press release, Gun Owners of America said its team in Washington had been working behind the scenes with Congress since the November 2024 election to fully repeal the NFA, and that the new law had teed up their lawsuit against the registry it called an unconstitutional relic. Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4 to 5% of the total US workforce. In agriculture, food processing and construction, they make up between 15 and 20% of the workforce. Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea of owner responsibility. They're going to be largely responsible for these people, trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the US south during Reconstruction, thanks to the fact that the 13th Amendment permits enslavement as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact, employers in many different sectors used and abused such workers. Today, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers working in the facility itself or in government run businesses or services like call centers or firefighting. About 3% work for private sector employers where they earn very low pay. Snyder urges Americans to be aware that the law paves the way to establish this system. Harvard sociologist Theda Skokpol identified massive militarization of ICE as the real heart of this law. She notes that American scholars have thought the federal system in the US in which state and local governments control the police powers, bought the US some protection against a police state. But Skugpol says officials in the Trump administration have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a US President can exercise virtually unchecked legal, coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and a corrupted Department of Justice. Now, Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources, much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors, Trump patronizes, but lots to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and and fellow American citizens. Administration officials are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants, she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements to harass Democrats and citizen critics and subvert future elections if they can. At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump complained that Democrats had not supported the budget reconciliation bill less than three weeks after a gunman murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and shot another legislator and his wife. Trump said Democrats had opposed the measure only because they hate Trump. But I hate them too. You know that. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss, Sam.