By LaToya Parker and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad
Photos: People’s World\YouTube Screenshot\Wikimedia Commons
The House recently passed a massive Trump budget bill that will cut trillions in taxes for the ultra-wealthy while eviscerating Medicaid, SNAP, and other services for working Americans. It has now moved to the Senate.
This bill has been called a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It will also entrench racial economic inequality, subsidizing dynastic wealth for the majority white top 0.1% while defunding the public-sector jobs and benefits that have long sustained the Black working class.
Among other tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, this bill eliminates the estate tax for ultra-wealthy households. The federal estate tax currently applies only to estates worth more than $13.99 million per individual (or $27.98 million per couple) in 2025. That’s just 0.1% of estates. Repealing the estate tax would cost the federal government billions in lost revenue and benefit only the very wealthiest households.
Racially, the impact is stark: Black families hold less than 5% of U.S. wealth, despite making up over 13% of households. And the median white household has ten times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax would be a massive wealth transfer to the already wealthy, doing nothing for the 99.9% of Americans—especially Black households—who are far less likely to inherit wealth.
To offset the cost of these massive tax breaks for the wealthy, the bill slashes all kinds of programs that working Americans rely on. One particularly cruel cut is to reduce benefits for federal employees and gut civil service protections. These changes threaten one of the most secure avenues for Black economic progress—government employment—for “savings” of just over $5 billion a year in a bill that will cost trillions….READ MORE
