The highest price for President Donald Trump’s second-term plans will be paid by those who are not yet born.
Yes, it’s true that today’s lower- and middle-income families will shoulder a large share of the cost – and that’s what’s getting most of the attention as Republicans push through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that for all Trump’s populist rhetoric, pursues a mostly conventional Republican approach.
It offers a tax policy that rewards the affluent far more than working- or middle-class families and targets substantial spending reductions at programs that mostly benefit blue-collar households.
The respected budget model devised by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania forecasts that the combined result after about a decade will be to reduce incomes for families in the bottom 60% of the income distribution, while showering the top 0.1% with over $100,000 in annual benefits.
But the generational implications are even larger. In Trump’s plan, “what you see clearly is a redistribution from the poor to the rich and from the unborn to (those) currently alive,” says Felix Reichling, a senior economist for the Penn/Wharton budget model.
The GOP budget directs its deepest spending cuts toward Medicaid and SNAP, formerly known as food stamps; one-fifth of the spending for Medicaid, and over two-fifths for SNAP, goes toward children. And while the tax cuts, of course, primarily benefit older people in their prime working years, it is younger generations – especially those not yet born – who will pay for them through bigger federal debts that could raise interest rates, destabilize bond markets and slow future economic growth.
As these factors intersect, the Penn/Wharton model projects that most young people alive today – except those in the lowest income bracket – will still come out ahead in their lifetime income from the tax and spending plan. But future Americans aren’t so fortunate: The model finds that all Americans who will be born into the bottom three quintiles of the income ladder over the next 20 years will lose more than they gain from the package.
With its tax cuts funded primarily by increasing debt, Reichling says, the plan is “taking resources from future generations and giving them to current generations.”
The same can be said about other pillars of Trump’s second-term agenda. On many fronts, he seems to be governing by the maxim in a memorable tequila ad: Tomorrow is overrated.
In the name of reducing short-term energy costs, Trump is eviscerating federal efforts to combat climate change. That will dim long-term prospects for future generations in two distinct respects. One is by exposing them to greater risks from extreme weather and disruptive climate shifts.
The other is by sapping America’s ability to compete for the trillions expected to be spent worldwide through 2035 on clean energy infrastructure, which is already attracting nearly twice as much annual investment as fossil fuels.
Terminating federal health research grants today, as one medical school official recently put it, means that 10 or 20 years from now, “we won’t have this pipeline of amazing new drugs.”
The most important word in Trump’s political lexicon has always been again – as in Make America Great Again. It signals that his vision for America’s future revolves around recreating the past. With that perspective, it’s not surprising that Trump shows so little interest in what his agenda may cost future generations. But he’s steering by looking through the rearview mirror –which is as dangerous in public policy as it is on the highway.
