


President Donald Trump’s budget bill is going to make your life more difficult.
Yes, you’ll get a tax cut. And that will be nice.
But unless you’re a billionaire, that cut won’t amount to much — and it will be outweighed by the ways the legislation puts new obstacles in the path of your day-to-day life.
Health care will be harder to obtain. Housing and cars will get more expensive. So will your groceries.
Here are three ways Trump’s budget will make your life more challenging.
Health care will get worse:You’ve likely heard about the Medicaid cuts that will throw millions of Americans out of the program and make doctor’s visits more costly for those who remain. The damage to American health care doesn’t stop there, nor is it limited to low-income folks.
The bill also makes it harder to get and keep health coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and it will limit the subsidies that 93% of enrollees get to make the coverage more affordable.
Even if you are covered, good luck getting to see a physician. New caps on student loans will discourage smart young people from going to medical school, exacerbating America’s existing doctor shortage.
Here’s an idea: Maybe don’t get sick the next few years.
Groceries will get pricier: You might think that the $230 billion in cuts to SNAP benefits — we once called them food stamps — will just affect the folks who get those benefits. That would be awful enough.
But there are ripple effects. Your local grocery store? It sells a lot of food to people who pay using SNAP: The program reportedly accounts for 5% of all supermarket purchases. That may not sound like a ton, but it’s a critical customer base in a low profit margin business. Some stores may disappear, or make up the lost dollars with the customers who remain.
Trump’s bill will also supercharge mass deportations by funneling $170 billion in new funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Which is frankly terrifying.
But it’s also a problem even if you’re not a migrant. Beef prices are already rising — of course they are! — because meatpacking plants are disproportionately staffed by migrant workers who are now going absent from the workplace. Now ICE will have real muscle.
The next time you pass on a pricey cheeseburger, think of Trump and his GOP allies.
Stuff will get more costly: Trump’s bill is the worst of all possible worlds. It makes deep cuts to important federal programs, but somehow also plunges the country an additional $3 trillion into debt.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the government will likely pay higher interest rates on all that debt. And that, too, will have ripple effects for everybody else: “Mortgages, car loans and credit card payments” will all get more expensive, CNN reported last week.
If you have a big-ticket item to buy on credit, then, you’d better do it before Trump’s bill goes into effect.
The dispiriting thing here is that Trump’s bill doesn’t come close to covering all the ways he is making life a little worse, a little more difficult for Americans. The legislation isn’t a factor in the White House moves to slash arts funding for local groups, or its decision last week to pull back $7 billion in funding for after-school and summer programs at local schools. Trump did all that on his own initiative, without Congress.
But the bill does plenty that’s bad.
And again Republicans proudly put their stamp of approval on it.
The effect of all this will be to make the country smaller, meaner and grubbier, its people less ambitious and more focused on the struggle simply to get by and survive. And we’re told all of this is in service of making America great again.
That can’t possibly be true.
You have to ask: Great for whom? The billionaires who get to reap big tax savings, perhaps. But not for your neighbors. Not for your community. And not for you.
Joel Mathis is a Kansas City Star correspondent.