US President Donald Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on the White House South Lawn on July 4, 2025. Photo courtesy the White House/Flickr.

On July 4 the US Congress passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—or BBB for short. The mainstream media and economists have mostly been reporting the details of the tax cuts contained in the bill—that is, which taxes got cut, how much accrued to businesses and the wealthy as opposed to the rest of us, what the impact is on GDP, and maybe even on government deficits and debt. All interesting facts. But not the most important. They purposely ignore the cuts in historical perspective and the bigger picture they represent.

That bigger picture is the looming fiscal crisis driven by the growing convergence of runaway tax cutting since 2001, chronic escalating defence and war spending, more frequent, deeper crashes of the economy with slower economic growth between, and, since 2022, accelerating trillion dollar annual interest costs on the US national debt.

The US national debt is on track to reach $38 trillion by year-end 2025. Interest payments to bondholders are already exceeding $1 trillion a year. The Congressional Budget Office, the research arm of Congress, estimates the national debt will reach $56 trillion by 2034 with interest payments of $1.7 trillion—and all that before Trump’s just-passed $5 trillion tax cuts.

Moreover, the US elite today show no sign of addressing the coming fiscal crash. Congress continues to cut taxes by trillions of dollars on corporations, investors and the wealthiest one percent households; to raise spending on the Pentagon, wars and other ‘defence’; to allow the health insurance industry and Big Pharma to gouge the US Treasury; and to pay holders of US securities—foreign and US—trillions of dollars more every year.

Multiple studies show that, historically, 60 percent of the US budget deficits and thus national debt are due to insufficient tax revenues—from chronic tax cutting, slow economic growth, legal avoidance and fraud. Here are some interesting facts about cumulative tax cuts by both political parties together since 2001.

George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001–03 amounted to $3.8 trillion over the decade 2001–10. Estimates are that roughly 80 percent accrued to corporations, businesses, and wealthy individuals by focusing overwhelmingly on individual income tax rates, corporate capital gains and dividends, and the estate tax affecting the wealthiest one percent of households. Bush then cut taxes in the spring of 2008 by another $180 billion as the economy began to slide into recession and the great crash of 2008–09.

When Obama took over in 2009 his American Rescue Plan stimulus for the economy provided for another $325 billion in tax cuts. His entire stimulus plan was $787 billion; another $280 billion of the remaining $487 billion went to the states which then hoarded most of it. So less than $200 billion went to stimulate consumption which immediately proved too little to reboot the US economy. He had to add another $25 billion for “cash for clunkers” and another $25 billion for “first-time home buyers” later that year. Most of the latter, moreover, didn’t go to home buyers but to mortgage lenders as incentive to approve more mortgages.

When Bush’s tax cuts came up for renewal in 2010, Obama extended them for another two years through 2012. That amounted to another $803 billion in tax cuts, again mostly to the wealthy and corporations.

In August 2011, in an agreement with the Republican Congress, Obama cut social program spending by $1.5 trillion in a new ‘austerity’ plan. $1 trillion was cut in just education and other social programs; $0.5 trillion was supposed to be cut for defence spending but was kicked down the road and never applied. Social program cuts always follow crisis bailouts. They did in 2011 after the 2009–10 bailouts. They’re occurring again today after the 2020–21 COVID bailouts—more on that shortly.

The 2012 Obama tax cuts made the Bush tax cuts permanent. They cost another $5 trillion. They were supposed to avoid what the media and lobbyists called the pending ‘fiscal........

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