Not that there is ever a good time to be suffering through economic stress, but the Trump administration is creating more stress than most Americans would like to absorb.

 Consider the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed last night and now sends on to the Republican Senate, which will likely approve some near-disaster minor rewrite before passing the bill into law. This bill will have winners and losers, of course, as does every budget financing the U.S. government. But for most of us, well, you may not be on the winning side of its economic outcome.

The winners are high-income earners, who will increase their net income; small businesses, who will receive expanded tax deductions; tipped workers and defense industries and border security forces. If you are in those groups, this bill is for you.

The losers of this about-to-become law disaster are everyone else, most notably low-income earners and, specifically, anyone receiving food assistance, including the SNAP program recipients, and Medicaid recipients, with nearly ten million altogether losing their health care coverage. Related losers are America’s small, rural hospitals, many of which survive because of Medicaid.

And then there is the estimated new debt of four trillion over the next decade, raising our already critical debt from $36 trillion to over $40 trillion and stimulating inflation and the possibility of recession.

This may look like not-so-good news, but there is more to the story:

Rewarding the wealthy is happening at a time when income inequality in the U.S. is at a historically high level, when the top 10% of earners control nearly 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened over the most recent few decades.

Punishing the poor has become a pet project of the Trump administration, but doing so when food needs are at an all-time high, when our national historic international food help has been destroyed through the destruction of USAID, and when the economy is sliding downward, is going to cause severe suffering in vulnerable communities.

Moreover, while small businesses receive valuable benefits in this bill, those benefits will likely be more than offset by the new tariffs still being assigned to their importation of the products that fill their shelves. Offered no protection from the Trump administration, these businesses face daunting escalations in their cost of doing business at a time when competition from mega retailers is already making their survival challenging.

The federal budget, determined by the party in power, is perhaps the only meaningful legislation that this Congress will pass in the first two years of the Trump administration, so its values, expressed in funding only, reflect a government that punishes the weakest among us and rewards the richest of Americans. Our Republican friends will, in many states, vote against their citizens, against their hunger, against their healthcare, and against their hope for a better future. They will do so knowing their vote may cost them their seat in Congress, but either agreeing with Mr. Trump’s priorities, or intimidated by Trump so much that they will risk their seats to avoid his wrath.

In the end, their motivation does not matter so much. It is their actions that will resonate with all Americans, their choices to accept unaffordable debt, to risk recession to reward the rich, and to use policy to hurt millions of their voters.

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.