All the Ways the Republican Tax Bill Will Help Rich People While Screwing You Over

In an age of unprecedented inequality, Senate Republicans still found the gall to pass a tax plan in the early hours of Saturday morning that constitutes an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the very wealthy. As The New York Times reported on Friday: “By 2027, people making $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion cut.”

While the Senate and House have yet to reconcile the differences between their plans—aside from the most obvious measures like slashing the corporate tax rate—they are both stark in the number of provisions that brazenly dole out handouts to the extremely wealthy friends and family of Republican legislators. So what are (some) of the fun ways the GOP tax plan benefits the rich and fucks you over?

• Helping extremely wealthy people pass down their estates to their undeserving spawn by reducing or eliminating the estate tax, which only affects 0.2% of Americans who have assets that exceeds $5.49 million per person (and nearly $11 million for married couples).
• Helping fancy parents pay for their fancy kids to go to fancy private schools under a provision that allows parents to use tax-exempt 529 college saving plans for K-12 private school tuition.
• Helping their friends in the alcohol industry.
• Helping their friends in the oil drilling industry.
• Helping their friends in the airline industry.
• Helping their friends in the cruise ship industry.
• Fucking over the 13 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance over the next decade by repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate.
• Fucking over undocumented immigrants who now have to provide a social security number to claim the child tax credit, which would directly impact one million undocumented children, according to one estimate.
• And last, but certainly not least: fucking over children, the elderly, the poor (basically everyone but the very rich) by setting the stage for Republicans to use the increased deficit to justify further cuts to anti-poverty and entitlement programs down the road. Orrin Hatch made this mission very clear when he said “we don’t have money anymore” to “help people who won’t help themselves” while talking about funding children’s healthcare. Last month, Paul Ryan reinforced that insidious notion by saying “we’ve got a lot of work to do in cutting spending,” while Marco Rubio spoke out about “instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.”

This isn’t just about a bad tax bill. This is nothing less than class warfare; people will die. But at least the few rich people at the top will be able to buy (even more) nice things at the expense of everyone else.