Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is an advanced stage of a disease that took hold long ago.

Donald Trump has done away with much of the Reaganite conservative ideology that defined the Republican party of my youth. But one Reagan tradition remains in place: Every time the GOP finds itself in control of both Congress and the Presidency, they pass a giant tax cut. Bush did this in 2001, Trump did this in 2017, and now Trump is about to do it once again in 2025. Trump’s rather ludicrously titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act is, first and foremost, a tax cut bill. The Economist tallied up the numbers on the version of the OBBBA that just passed the Senate, and found that tax cuts dominated everything else in terms of their impact on the government’s finances.

All of this means that the U.S. has to both raise taxes and cut spending in order to maintain solvency and keep interest costs down.1 The Medicaid cuts that the Republicans are enacting are cruel, but unless our government comes up with some way to control health costs much more effectively than ever before, something along those general lines will eventually be necessary. There just isn’t much else that the government spends a lot of money on; defense spending has been cut to the bone, even as foreign threats proliferate.

The way to make that bargain seem fair was always to tax the rich. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton hiked taxes on the rich, and managed to raise federal revenue from 16.7% of GDP in 1992 to 19% of GDP by 1998. 2.3% of GDP might not sound like a lot, but today that would be $690 billion a year, or $6.9 trillion over a decade. The rich didn’t even get particularly mad about this. And it ended up making Clinton’s fiscal austerity a lot more palatable to the masses, because people knew the rich were paying their fair share to help bring the deficit down.