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Michael Hillard is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Southern Maine.
We often hear that budgets reflect values. The current Trump-backed “Big Beautiful Bill” now before the Senate seems to have one clear value: take from the poor and give to the rich. It will essentially lower the incomes of working-class Mainers making below $50,000 to finance a massive tax giveaway to millionaires. The Republican/Trump budget puts the lie to the conventional wisdom which claims that Trump and his party is somehow now the party of the working class.
How did we get here? It’s common knowledge that the top reason many swing voters chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris last November is the economy. As an economist, I know that any party that’s in power when inflation spikes is likely to lose an election because voters rightfully hate to see their paychecks eaten up at the pump and the store. As one Maine Trump voter put it last year: “Everything is ridiculous right now, especially at the grocery store. Inflation is bad.”
It was these voters that delivered the White House to Trump. A Washington Post poll examining “swing state swing voters” indeed found by a large margin that the economy was their top reason for voting for him over Harris.
For voters expecting lower prices and a better economy, Trump’s presidency thus far is a case of bait and switch. Economists know that presidents and Congresses have little short-term influence over the prices of goods and services. The high inflation of a year or two ago was due mainly to COVID-related supply chain snarls that sent prices up by the same amount in every nation in the world.
Since Nov. 6 of last year, gas and egg prices have been mostly higher, and the overall cost of food in Maine is up 4 percent since January. But unless the president nationalizes these and other industries, the market forces governing these prices are beyond his control.
What presidents and the Congress do control are budgets and direct policies like tariffs. We don’t know yet about the full impact of Trump’s radical tariff plans, which change by the day, but economists widely agree that they will likely raise prices to consumers by thousands of dollars annually.
What is more certain is that the Trump-Congressional Republican budget bill will take away from working class voters to enrich millionaires. Republicans have made bizarre and false claims about it, somehow stating, for example, that they aren’t cutting Medicaid when the bill — by their own math — actually cuts it by $880 billion in the coming decade. Credible sources estimate that it will soon throw more than 10 million Americans and at least 30,000 Mainers off Medicaid. Counting lost benefits that offset miniscule tax breaks for workers, households earning under $51,000 will lose over $700 per year while households making over $4.3 million would get more than $389,000 on average.
Perhaps a handful of Republican senators might somehow stop caving to Trump’s pressure and we will see slight reductions to these draconian Medicaid and SNAP cuts. Still, there is the rest of the Trump program. DOGE cuts will cause credit card, water, and gas bills increase by $1,000 per year. And the Republican budget bill increases the national debt by trillions of dollars. Experts point out that we may be on the precipice of dramatic increases in interest rates that will make housing even more expensive and swamp an already stressed Treasury, thanks to the bill’s projected increase in debt.
Be careful what you wish for when you throw the bums out. You might just be voting for even bigger bums.
