The Big Beautiful Heist

 "We must learn to see policy not only as economy, but as ontology, shaping not just who gets what, but who gets to be." 

Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has arrived, decked out in populist rhetoric and promising tax cuts for hardworking families. Its aesthetic is familiar, chummy, exaggerated, and brashly optimistic. Yet beneath the gloss lies a disturbing truth: this is not simply a piece of fiscal legislation but a continuation of a decades-long project that extracts wealth from the public and people with low incomes and transfers it upward into the hands of a shrinking elite.

If the post-2008 era has taught us anything, political economy has become less about "solving problems" and more about reconfiguring human life to suit the logic of capital. From an existential materialist perspective, we view this bill not merely as an economic intervention but as an ontological act that shapes reality. It defines who matters, what deserves protection, and how human value is measured.

From Crisis to Opportunity, but for Whom?

The financial crash of 2008 was a historic rupture. Millions lost their homes, jobs, pensions, and faith in the system. But what followed wasn’t a rebalancing of power or a reckoning for the institutions that caused the collapse. Instead, the crisis became an opportunity for the already wealthy.

Central banks responded with quantitative easing, injecting trillions into the financial system. This money inflated the value of assets, stocks, real estate, and corporate bonds. But these assets weren’t held by the working class. They were overwhelmingly owned by the wealthiest 10%, notably the top 1%. While wage earners struggled with job insecurity and debt, the rich made a killing just by staying rich.

This era also ushered in austerity politics, especially in countries like Ireland, the UK, and parts of the U.S. Welfare budgets were slashed, public housing was sold off, healthcare spending was capped, and state services were thinned to the bone, all justified by a moral language of “living within our means.” But this wasn’t belt-tightening, it was class war. And it worked.

The Pandemic as a Portal for the Powerful

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it exposed the fragility of these austerity-decimated systems. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Workers were suddenly "essential" but expendable. Governments rushed to respond with emergency funding and stimulus packages. At first glance, this seemed like a progressive moment: universal payments, rent moratoriums, massive public spending.

But again, the structural beneficiaries were the rich. The stock market soared, and Big Tech consolidated power. Billionaires added trillions to their wealth. Meanwhile, short-term cash transfers to everyday people were quickly revoked or undermined by rising inflation, rent hikes, and the return of precarity.

The pandemic accelerated the system's core logic rather than resetting it: socialise the losses, privatise the recovery. In this context, Trump’s new bill is less a departure from history than its culmination.

The Big Beautiful Bill, Policy as Performance

Officially titled the “Middle-Class Tax Relief and Family Prosperity Act,” the bill has been marketed with Trump’s characteristic flair as “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It promises to lower taxes, reward families, and unleash economic growth. But what it does is deeply revealing.

What’s In the Bill:

• Permanent tax cuts for corporations and high earners
• Expanded child tax credits, but only temporarily
• Exemptions for overtime and tip income, a nod to service workers
• Massive cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food assistance), disability supports, and housing vouchers
• Estate tax changes that benefit the ultra-wealthy

The Congressional Budget Office and multiple think tanks have made the impact clear:

• The top 0.1% of households stand to gain upwards of $80,000 annually
• The bottom 20% of earners will see either minimal gains or net losses, especially when public services are factored in
• Millions could lose healthcare or face reduced food and housing support

In short, the bill gives some a short-term boost but permanently enriches the already wealthy while weakening the public systems that working-class families depend on.

A Transfer of Wealth and Ontology

It would be tempting to treat this as bad policy or misguided economics. But it’s more coherent, and more dangerous, than that. From an existential materialist lens, this is an intentional reordering of being itself.

Let’s break this down:

1. Economic policy doesn’t just distribute wealth, it defines who is “valuable.” When you defund health services, food supports, or disability benefits, you are implicitly saying: these lives are less worth supporting.

2. Tax breaks for capital holders signal that wealth is more important than work. A hedge fund manager reaps exponential benefits, while a carer or cleaner gets a fleeting exemption.

3. When public services are hollowed out, we are forced into atomised, competitive individualism. The bill enshrines a logic where you're either “productive” or a “burden,” and your well-being is a private matter, not a social concern.

4. This isn’t just policy. It’s ontology. It defines who gets to be in a society obsessed with profitability.

Ideology as Infrastructure

No project of this scale works without ideology. That’s where media, think tanks, and corporate lobbying come in.

• Billionaires fund institutes that promote deregulation, low taxes, and "personal responsibility."
• Pundits repeat the line that welfare breeds dependency, while corporate tax breaks are “growth incentives.”
• Popular discourse shifts: workers are rebranded as “job creators” when they’re investors, and as “lazy” when they’re unemployed.

This ideological infrastructure turns economic violence into common sense. It suppresses the moral imagination required to believe that another world is possible. It also ensures that policies like the Big Beautiful Bill are received not with revolt but with resignation or, worse, applause.

Existential Materialist Resistance

What would it mean to resist this?

From an existential materialist standpoint, resistance isn’t just about policy; it’s about reclaiming what it means to be human in a system that commodifies everything.

This means:

• Naming the system: Unequal outcomes are not bugs; they are the system working as designed.
• Collective subjectivity: Organising with others in unions, cooperatives, and community groups helps us remember that we are not alone.
• Public reclamation: Fighting for housing, healthcare, and education not as market services, but as human rights rooted in dignity.
• Ontological refusal: Rejecting the idea that our worth depends on income, output, or productivity. Reclaiming rest, care, art, and slowness are essential to life.

Policies should not exist to reward hoarding. It should enable being.

The Stakes

The Big Beautiful Bill is not the beginning. Still, it may be the symbolic endpoint of a political trajectory that began in earnest after 2008: a decades-long project of taking from the public to enrich the private. It consolidates the power of capital while gutting the collective foundations of care and solidarity.

If unchallenged, the result is clear:

• Economic apartheid
• Surveillance capitalism
• Private interest managed climate collapse
• A hollowed-out public sector, reduced to platforms and paywalls

But if we challenge it existentially and materially, we can reclaim more than just policy. We can reclaim the conditions of aliveness.

Being Against the Bill

Opposing the Big Beautiful Bill is not just about wanting better taxation or services. It is about defending the possibility of a shared world, where humans matter not because they earn but because they exist, where governments protect people, not portfolios, and where society is a community, not a competition.

The project of existential materialism calls us to see through the illusion: this bill is not beautiful. It is brutal. And the only thing big about it, and similar measures in Ireland and worldwide, is the lie that it will save us.

Let us choose, instead, to save each other.