What’s in the “One Big Beautiful Bill”?

Last week on July 4th, President Donald Trump signed a major reconciliation package dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. The legislation includes wide-reaching changes to taxes, healthcare, immigration enforcement, energy policy, and social safety net programs.

Taxes

The bill cements Trump-era tax cuts by making key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, including lower income tax brackets and an expanded standard deduction. It raises the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000 for households earning under $500,000, a move that primarily benefits homeowners in high-property-value areas. Meanwhile, the child tax credit is reduced, and new deductions are added for tips and overtime. Business tax breaks were also expanded.

Georgist concern: Tax policy continues to reward landowners while failing to tax the unearned gains from rising land values, shifting the burden onto workers and renters. Georgists do however support the untaxing of labor and agree with tax-free tips and overtime above and beyond current deductions.

Healthcare and Safety Net

Medicaid will see cuts that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will leave 16 million more Americans uninsured by 2034. SNAP (food stamps) faces new work requirements and reduced eligibility, despite 41.7 million people relying on the program in FY 2024.

Georgist concern: Cuts to public services without capturing land and resource rents push more burden onto labor while shielding rentier income. Without land value taxation, public spending often falls into rising land values.

Immigration & Enforcement

The bill increases funding for ICE and CBP by billions, intensifying immigration enforcement and raising fees for asylum applications. Deportations surged in 2024.

Georgist concern: The bill contributes to the public debt by increasing spending without raising revenue through the taxation of economic rent.

Energy

Tax credits for new wind and solar projects are eliminated. Fossil fuel development is subsidized through reduced costs and regulatory easing.

Georgist concern: Natural resource rent extraction remains largely untaxed. Private fossil fuel companies will be receiving subsidies making their profits internalized and both the financial and environmental costs will be externalized to the American public.

Debt & Defense

The debt ceiling is raised by $5 trillion, bringing it to $41 trillion. Defense spending climbs to $873 billion, with new investments in nuclear, naval, and missile systems.

Georgist concern: Defense budgets funnel enormous sums into private weapons contractors who profit from federal land, subsidies, infrastructure, and intellectual property monopolies often without returning value to the public. These rents are extracted through monopolies and no-bid contracts, much like private landowners collect rent from location value they didn’t create. Meanwhile, interest on the growing debt enriches bondholders, another part of the rentier class, without addressing the root causes of public revenue shortfall: the failure to capture economic rent from land and natural resources.

Notable Economic Concerns:

While the bill extends tax benefits to middle- and upper-income earners, it reduces funding for public programs that disproportionately serve low-income individuals. Some Georgist critics note that these changes shift the tax burden away from land and monopoly rent, and toward labor and consumption.