Suppose a Martian landed in Washington a couple of weeks ago, perhaps seeking clarity on Elon Musk’s intentions, and somehow happened upon House Republicans on their way to passing their Big Beautiful Bill, plotting the path into the future for the most powerful nation on Earth.
The Big Beautiful Bill goes to Mars
The U.S. is a rich nation willing to let its people die to lower taxes for the wealthy.
June 4, 2025This is a country whose people have lost years of life expectancy over the past two decades compared to the citizens of peer nations, where the suicide rate has risen by a quarter, where nearly 1 in 5 live in poverty and 1 in 12 lack health insurance. This is a country, moreover, exhibiting the most lopsided distribution of the fruits of prosperity in its peer class.
And yet, the U.S.’s political leaders are planning to drastically reduce funding for government programs that finance health care and nutrition assistance for the most vulnerable of its people. And they are doing this, mostly, to pay for a reduction in the taxes the government collects from the most affluent.
If people on Earth are not quite as perplexed as the Martian expeditionary, it is only because we have become accustomed to America’s preferences, clearly expressed through repeated efforts over the years to cut taxes and “starve the beast” of government, no matter the consequences in terms of morbidity, mortality and social cohesion.
On Earth, the most prevalent feeling is probably one of exasperation. The United States is by many measures the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth, sitting on the frontier of innovation and consistently outpacing its peers in terms of economic growth over recent decades. Still, over the course of a decade or so, this country has become an existential threat to the international order that underpinned its own success — undercutting rules and institutions of its own design and lashing out at allies that helped sustain the system it led.
Why? Largely because a sense of grievance over being left behind, excluded from the all-American story of unrivaled prosperity, propelled millions of angry voters to turn their back on the economic, military and political arrangements that glued together the liberal democratic order upon which such “prosperity” was built and vote for a politician who promised to tear it all down.
Given the precarious state that this revolution has left the world in, one might suggest to America’s political leaders that they could spend some money addressing some of the objective causes of grievance: maybe the off-the-charts rate of premature mortality and avoidable deaths, the prevalence of low pay, the high infant mortality rate or the deadly violence.
Apologists of the American Way will argue that it’s not up to the government to address this stuff: Fixing these pathologies is all about encouraging personal responsibility (and, maybe, bombing Mexico). That’s why adding work requirements to Medicaid makes sense, even though it will deprive millions of Americans of health insurance. And, they will surely add, cutting taxes will goose economic growth by encouraging businesses to invest and people to work harder and spend more, making America even more prosperous.
The fact remains, though, that despite being poorer and further from the technological frontier, America’s social-democratic peers — whose governments spend more effort and taxpayer money to directly mitigate social maladies — have done a much better job at maintaining the health of their people and their societies.
This raises the question: What’s the point of being the most powerful, affluent nation on earth?
If Martians exist, they must undoubtedly be relieved that Musk’s efforts to occupy Mars have taken a knock of late. It would truly suck to be colonized by a nation so indifferent to the suffering of its own.
As for the people on this planet, they still have a chance of preventing the Big Beautiful Bill from taking us another big step toward a more lopsided cornucopia. As people on Wall Street know, TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out when the bond market shudders. And the bond market is shuddering about now. It won’t be enough to bring about equitably shared prosperity. But maybe it can prevent Trump’s aggrieved voters from falling further into despair.