How the Republican Megabill Hurts Everyone

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

On July 4th, Donald Trump signed a massive tax and spending bill into law.

As a former tax attorney who did her master's degree with a focus on tax policy, the implications of this bill cannot be overstated.

This law, no matter what it's called, represents a cruel manifestation of the Republican Party's goal of further enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, and our youngest generations.

As for what we call it, some Democrats are calling it the Trump tax.

And while I like the clarity and the alliteration, we should understand what it really truly is.

A devastating betrayal by Republicans at every level of government that will upend the lives of millions of Americans for generations to come.

Search through the bill, nearly 1,100 pages at one time, and you would be hard pressed to to find any sliver of hope for working class and middle-class families.

The oft-repeated promise of tax relief on overtime or tips turns out to be a sleight of hand that vanishes almost instantly and is timed to disappear.

Republicans who champion these successes are engaged right now in a feat of magical thinking and of remarkable ignorance about how itemization really works.

The only ones who benefit from this will be the wealthy Americans who watch their funds miraculously multiply, and the average Americans are told to play the dupe.

By slashing programs that everyday Americans rely on, like health care, educational funds, and food assistance, Donald Trump and Republicans are lining the pockets of their real base, the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected.

This bill imposes harsh new restrictions on Medicaid, including mandatory work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks, meaning more paperwork to ensure a poor person doesn't earn a few extra dollars.

Ostensibly, these rules ensure that able-bodied adults will now have to prove they're working, doing community service, receiving job training for at least 80 hours per month, or are enrolled in school part-time.

But what that means is that even people who've just been laid off, especially in the midst of an economic downturn, could lose their health insurance simply for being between jobs, or that full-time caregivers will have to abandon their families to prove they are worthy of help.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that these changes will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade, not because they've suddenly moved into the middle class, but because their poverty isn't offensive enough.

The bill also shifts the cost burden of SNAP, which which is previously known as food stamps.

It shifts it onto some states, dangerously undermining a program that is currently federally funded.

These new rules, drafted at the same time as exemptions that will give $10 million private jets free usage, leverage the same faulty logic of work requirements to jeopardize the food security of millions, especially children.

And as a result, an estimated 22.3 million families could lose some or all of their food benefits.

And yet, for a bill they claim to be proud of, Republicans are being awfully bashful about showing and celebrating their work.

See, the Republican champions of this bill have cleverly delayed the implementation of some of the more harmful cuts until after the 2026 midterms in a cowardly attempt to hide what they've done from their constituents.

And on top of gutting essential programs, the legislation raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

What that means is that we've taken out even more loans to finance billionaires, and our children and their children will have to pay it back in one of the largest wealth transfers in history.

All while student loans get more expensive, all while health care becomes less and less available, all while children and families go hungry.

To fund their fever dream of oligarchy, Republicans also eliminated the clean energy tax incentives from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

The programs they targeted largely focused on helping middle-class and working class Americans get the help they need to lower their cost and save the planet.

Republicans eliminated supports to make electric vehicles affordable.

They canceled energy efficiency programs that would lower utility bills.

And they rescinded investments that mitigated centuries of targeted harm for Black, Brown, and poor neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the bill allocates more than $46.5 billion for the Republican border wall, $45 billion more to expand immigrant detention facilities without investing in due process, and another $30 billion to hire and train ICE agents who have functionally become a secret federal police force with expanding domains.

That's over a $120 billion in taxpayer money.

And to put it into context, this is a budget larger than that of most militaries around the world, with all of these dollars being redirected towards inhumane abductions and illegal deportations.

The Republican mega bill will harm millions, especially when coupled with the recent rescission bill.

And this march to take from the many and give to the few is generally dangerous.

However, some groups will be hit even harder and pushed even further to the margins.

And the impact is clear.

Gen Z and young millennials are already on track to become the first generations to have a lower standard of living than their parents.

They've come of age in the shadow of two economic recessions, a global pandemic, and now two Trump presidencies that have passed laws and policies that account for an enormous wealth transfer from the young to the old, all while making it harder to climb the ladder to success.

Women of color will also be disproportionately impacted.

They're already subject to the pink tax, the well-documented phenomenon where products and services marketed to women are priced higher than those for men.

Add racial inequality to the mix, and the price tax skyrockets even further.

This bill doesn't just ignore those compounding inequities, it intentionally deepens them.

And so on today's episode of Assembly Required, we're going to dig into how this Republican tax and spend bill has unique harms, how it displaces and disenfranchises these two groups, young people and women of color.

To help us unpack this, we're joined by two experts, Natasha Sarin, Yale professor and president of the Yale Budget Lab, who's who's been called the Millennial Shaping Modern Tax Policy.

And Anna Gifty Opoku-Ajamin, a doctoral candidate at Harvard's Kennedy School, studying economics and public policy, and the author of the upcoming The Double Tax, How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid.

Together, we'll break down what's at stake, talk about who's being left behind, and most importantly, how these communities can organize, fight back, and begin to claw their way out from under the crushing weight of Trump and the Republicans' economic vision.

Welcome to Anna and Natasha.

Thank you so much for joining me today on Assembly Required.

Thanks so much for having us.

We set the stage earlier in the episode, but Natasha, can you walk us through what the Republican mega bill actually is and what kind of impact it has on everyday Americans?

And then Anna, I'm going to turn to you to talk about the specific groups that are going to be impacted by the bill.

But I'm going to start with you, Natasha.

Tell us what they've done to us.

So importantly, sort of starting at the very biggest picture, what the bill is, is it is a $3.4 trillion tax and spending bill that is deficit financed.

So first order, what we have done is we have increased deficits tremendously.

And the costs of those deficit increases are borne by households because what it means is that it's going to cost more for the U.S.

government to be able to borrow in the future.

It's also going to cost more for households to be able to borrow in the future.

It's also going to be harder to make investments in children and in fighting climate change because we have taken so much of our fiscal space and invested in it in what is fundamentally about tax cuts to the very, very top of the distribution.

So disproportionately, what we're doing here as a result of this bill is we are giving the very highest earners, those with the greatest ability to pay, the largest tax cut as a result of this package.

And the tax cuts are so significant that actually, in the absence of identifying some ways to pay for them, they would have been even larger and even more deficit busting.

And so, what legislators did is the ways that they identified to pay for these tax cuts are by cutting massive portions of the social safety net.

So, they're cutting things like food stamps, they're cutting things like Medicaid.

They're going to kick millions of people off of Medicaid and result in hundreds of thousands of premature deaths over the course of the next decade from people not being able to get the kind of healthcare coverage that they should be.

So it's a very, I've been calling the bill like the reverse Robin Hood bill, because what you're actually doing is you're taking from the bottom of the distribution and handing to the top.

and making things worse for future generations by spending $3 trillion plus

on in this deficit financed way.

So before I go to Anna, I'm going to ask you to lean in on one comment.

So we talk about deficit financing.

I'm 51 years old.

I've heard about deficits my entire sentient life as an American.

There was a brief period when we had a surplus under Bill Clinton, but for most of my life, the United States has been in a deficit position.

Tell me why that matters to the average person and particularly why this deficit is so much worse than what we're used to and what we've we've been able to survive for so long.

Yeah.

So there are, that's such a great question, Stacey, and so important.

And part of what I do at Yale is I run an organization called the Budget Lab.

And we have spent a lot of time in the last few months trying to make tangible some of these impacts, right?

Because when you say things like, even as I just did, this is going to be $3 trillion of deficit finance spending, like the numbers start to be so large that they're almost hard to grapple with in any tangible way right and so why should people care that we're spending three trillion plus dollars in a deficit financed way what that deficit financed spending means is that it means that your mortgage is going to be thousands of dollars more expensive.

Your car loan is going to be hundreds of dollars more expensive this year.

That's not just like numbers I've pulled out of a hat at the budget lab.

We've been putting out exactly these estimates.

We've been saying the result of these types of choices that we're making are going to have a direct impact on the interest rate environment.

Because when the U.S.

government has more debt outstanding, it has to pay people a higher rate to be able to hold, to be wanting to hold that debt.

But those interest costs actually go not just from government borrowing, they go into every aspect of the economy.

It's going to be harder for you to get a student loan.

It's going to be harder for you to get a car loan.

It's going to be harder for you to get a small business loan.

And I think that piece is like really important.

But there's another piece here that's kind of missing when we talk about deficits and the importance of and why people should care about them, which has to do with this concept that is called fiscal space.

But the basic idea is that there are, we don't exactly know when we are going to hit a fiscal crisis.

Like what people, what economists like Anna and I have said historically is that, oh, you definitely don't want to get past a debt to GDP ratio of 90 because then you're going to have problems and a drag on your growth.

Or you definitely don't want to get past 100.

Well, we're at 100 now and we're going to get to 130 plus over the course of the next 10 years as a result of this bill.

And I think it's a bit of a fool's errand to say there's any particular number or any particular level that you can't breach.

But what we know based on historical experience, both in the U.S.

and in other countries, is that eventually you get to a place where

those deficits, those debts that you have taken on as a country make it harder to grow your economy.

And not being able to grow your economy at a substantial enough level also bears on households.

It means fewer jobs.

It means a less good economic environment.

It means it's harder to put food on the table for families.

It's not that you shouldn't invest and spend as a government, but when you spend, you should feel good about those those investments.

They should be things that are important for you to undertake as a society.

I think it is hard at this moment with the level of inequality that we have in this country to argue that spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the very wealthiest kind of meets the bar of that type of spending need.

So part of what interested me about having this conversation with the two of you is that when we think about how to connect the dots for folks, one of the ways I've described deficit spending is that we went from borrowing from friends to borrowing from a bank, and now we're borrowing from loan sharks.

And you get the sort of seismic impact that comes with who you're borrowing from and what they expect in return for their dollars.

But Anna, you have been focused on what groups are the most impacted.

So when I use that analogy, part of the challenge is that we know that the folks who can afford to borrow from friends and family get a really nice deal.

The ones who have to borrow from banks, you know, they're going to pay a little bit more.

But those who are impacted by the

usurious rates and by those who do not necessarily care about your outcomes are going to be the most expensive to borrow from.

And the consequences for those communities will be the strongest.

So talk to us a little bit about which groups are the most impacted by this bill and not just who will benefit the most, but why they will benefit from those groups that are impacted.

So I think that if we just kind of zoom out for a second and think about the legacy of this country and who has sort of economically benefited, we have to take it all the way back to, of course, enslavement times and how we're thinking about who builds wealth.

There's really amazing work by Dr.

Lauren Derencourt that shows sort of the evolution of the racial wealth gap from 1860 through 2020.

And we see that, you know, at one point, the wealth gap between black and white folks was 56 to one, right?

That was right before enslavement ended.

And the reason why I'm bringing that up is because I think that when we want to talk about benefiting the wealthiest people, we need to ask the question, who tends to be wealthy, right?

Who tends to be in the bracket that would receive these types of tax cuts?

And they're not folks that look like you or me, right?

So this idea of the folks who are benefiting the most from this bill ultimately boils down to who has always had access to economic opportunity, who has always had access to wealth building opportunities, and who has always been given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the perception of wealth, who is even allowed to build wealth in this country.

And so, when we think about the groups that might be disproportionately impacted by it, I think Natasha said it, great, right?

It's a reverse Robin Hood.

So, the marginalized, the most marginalized, are oftentimes going to bear the brunt of a lot of the economic crises that this particular bill is creating, right?

So, if we're thinking about even just sort of how healthcare cuts that are happening across Medicaid and other aspects of the bill are impacting individual communities, we're talking about layoffs, right?

And the folks who tend to make up the, you know, really kind of grunt work of the healthcare workforce tends to be black women, right?

Overrepresented and underpaid.

And so we're seeing that they're going to definitely be the ones bearing the brunt, at least from a labor market perspective, as it is as it pertains to this bill, right?

And then if we think about also sort of who actually tends to use Medicaid, who tends to have opportunities to even get health insurance or get jobs that have access to good health insurance, we know there's frictions in the market due to racial discrimination, ageism, sexism.

And so all of these things compounded, right, mean that those, again, who are marginalized, who are already facing difficulties in getting these types of jobs that had good health insurance are going to probably be in a situation where they need to rely on the government.

And because the government now is not reliable, they are going to have to be paying higher premiums with no income or little income coming in, right?

I think the other thing that I wanted to note here too, two things is part of this bill that folks aren't talking about too, too much is sort of defunding planned parenthood.

And I don't know if folks know this, but the mortality crisis for mothers actually has gotten better for pretty much every group of women except black women as of 2022 to 2023, right?

And so when we think about planned parenthood and other mechanisms that are helping folks actually give birth to kids or maybe decide not to, these types of services are providing a greater good than people think, right?

So if we're trying to reduce the mortality crisis amongst mothers, you need family planning.

You need prenatal and postpartum care.

You need folks that are able to support you throughout the birthing process.

And defunding planned parenthood has disproportionate impacts on those who tend to potentially die from having kids, right?

And that tends to be black women, that tends to be women of color.

And then I know that we also talked very briefly about student debt, but student debt tends to be carried on by women.

I don't know if folks know that, right?

So this is according to the AAUW.

And then more specifically, if we think about the different racial groups and who tends to bear the brunt, once again, black women are the ones who are really bearing the brunt of student debt.

And so if we're seeing these increase in student debt payments during a cost of living crisis where you can't even afford to put eggs on your table, you having to decide between, am I paying my student debt payment or am I feeding myself this month is not a decision that you should be having to make.

But this is what this bill essentially puts in front of marginalized folks.

Anna, thank you so much because I think that ties into a question I have for Natasha.

And I'm going to come back and bring you in.

Natasha, we know that economists have suggested that it's Gen Z and millennials who are going to be one of the first generations to have a lower standard of living than their parents before them.

And we know that given what Anna just laid out in terms of the impact on particular demographics, which are highly represented within Gen Z and millennials, that the consequences are compounded.

Can you talk about what this phenomenon means and how this basically this tax bill is going to make it worse?

Yeah, and

it's a really important issue in part because the bill makes it worse in different ways.

So one thing that like the bill does baseline, as we've described, is it involves making this massive spending commitment today

to people who are older and already in the workforce.

So, we are saying we are cutting taxes for people who are at the top of the distribution, who have earned a lot.

And essentially, we are paying, we are taking money from future generations who aren't yet in the workforce and committing that future generations'

resources and future generations' investments are going to go to pay for this certain standard of living living for those at the very top of the distribution who are already well into their working years.

But we're doing this other thing, too, as a result of the bill that I worry isn't getting as much attention, which is we are failing to make really productive, important investments in future generations by doing things like, and just to take one particular example, we have a child tax credit in this country that that is incredibly important as a vehicle for lifting vulnerable children out of poverty.

And the way that the child tax credit has traditionally been analyzed by policymakers and by government economists is that it costs money.

It costs money.

to spend on families to make it easier for them to be able to, as Anna was describing, put food on the table each and every day.

But that's kind of a weird way to think about an object like a child tax credit.

Because when you invest in kids today and they have more food and they are more able to get to school on time and their parents are less stressed about their ability to provide for their children, they do better in school and they are more likely to go to college.

And they are more likely themselves to be productive members of the labor force when they grow up.

It just doesn't happen in a very short horizon.

And so, what this bill did for a child tax credit is it failed to make the child tax credit fully refundable.

What that means in practice is it failed to provide the full value of the credit to precisely those families that need it most and those kids that need it most.

And that we think of as it saved some money because, in the short run, your child tax credit on those families is smaller.

But that's like not the right way to think about it in the long run, because it actually is costing us money.

It is costing us stability.

It is costing us the capacity to have a productive next generation because we are failing to make those investments today.

And I think that's something that's really unfortunate.

And if the bill is riddled with choices like this, and frankly, policy is riddled with choices like this.

If you think about how much money we spend on elderly people who are retired as a country versus how little we spend on kids.

I think that is really quite telling about the ways in which the policy process works and the ways in which the political discourse kind of shapes outcomes.

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So, Natasha, you talked about the challenge with the tax credit and the fact that it's not fully refundable.

For people who don't do tax policy every day, so I'm sitting with two tax nerds and I am one myself.

We think about this in terms of policy structure, but there's intentionality behind it.

And we know that those intentions for this tax credit did not carry over, for example, to the carryover tax credit that corporations get to to use, the businesses get to use.

Can you talk a little bit about the mechanism of this child tax credit and why it matters?

Because so often we hear the words and it's just, it's like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher,

people don't know what it means.

So let's take a second and I'm going to come back to you, Anna, because I think what you said about Planned Parenthood is a perfect example of how we need to think about how these pieces work.

So talk a little bit about why the structure of this tax credit is intentionally designed not to help the very communities it should target.

I spent, was very lucky to spend two years in government at the Treasury Department where I worked for Secretary Yellen.

And the job that I had was very focused on tax policy and tax administration.

And I learned something in the process of doing that that like I should have known as a tax professor, but didn't fully appreciate until I was kind of on the ground, which is the implementation and administration of our immensely complicated tax code is riddled with policy choices.

That oftentimes I even wonder whether legislators who are writing the bill, and you saw it when this legislation was being drafted, and you had members of Congress saying, oh, I didn't even know that was in there.

If I had known that, there's no way I would have voted for the bill.

So, like,

it's really quite interesting and frankly perverse because it has a lot to do with it's not just intention, it's

political sort of

coalitions, and it's also about moneyed interests who are able to kind of invest in skewing particular provisions or skewing particular aspects of the code in the way that advantages them significantly.

And I'll give you an example at the top of the distribution.

If you think about something that President Trump has said that he thinks shouldn't be in the tax code, this sort of tax break for carried interest.

And what carried interest means is that if you happen to be a very wealthy person who works in finance, you know, rather than having your salary be like my salary or most people's salary, where it's a wage and, you know, your wages are subject to a certain tax rate depending on how much you make and your taxes are automatically withheld by your employer.

Well, you get to classify some of your wage income as this like special other thing that's called carried interest.

And that special other thing gets to have a lower tax rate.

And, you know, they'll tell you like the policy argument for it is this and this, and there's like an investment incentive and all this stuff.

But practically, what it means is that people in particular industries who happen to accrue income in particular ways get a better deal than regular people who are earning wages the way the vast majority of American families do.

And if you think about that type of a choice we're making, where you're sort of distorting the code and preferencing the code in favor of the very wealthiest amongst us, compare it to what has happened with the child tax credit, where the way the child tax credit is structured, it is a tax credit.

So it's structured such that, you know, you have a certain amount of taxable income and you get to take a credit, depending on how much money you make in a year and how many children you have, you get to take a credit that is, I'm going to pay less than my base rate would have been, less than my total dollar amount would have been in taxes as a result of the fact that I have children.

Well, if you are in a very, very low earning family, or in fact, if you have no federal income tax liability whatsoever, because not because you are so well off and you don't decide to work and you don't have a salary, it's because you're so poor that you do not have those income streams that accrue to you each year, then the fact that you get a tax credit isn't all that useful, useful, frankly, because it doesn't mean dollars in your pocket.

It is a liability that you wouldn't have had to pay anyway, and now you still don't have to pay it and you have children.

And so the thing, the choice that we are making essentially, is for the very lowest populations,

lowest earners, sort of bottom decile of the distribution, however you want to cut it, the people that arguably need this money most, not arguably, the people that do need this money most, the people whose kids are living in poverty, those people aren't getting access to their child tax credit because of the way the program has been structured to proactively leave them out of it.

And I think that's just a, it's kind of a crazy choice.

We live in America in 2025.

Like the idea that kids are hungry and living in poverty, it's we can afford better.

And we know we can afford better because we've spent trillions of dollars on tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top.

And Anna, your upcoming book, The Double Tax, really explores how women of color are systematically overcharged and underpaid.

And it also looks at how our tax system, much in the way that Natasha describes what happens to children, our tax system is designed to also harm disproportionately women of color.

So can you start by breaking down what the double tax is, what it builds on, and how it goes beyond the concept of the pink tax, which a lot of people know about, where products and services are marketed to women and they often cost more.

Absolutely.

So the double tax, as defined by, I guess, me, is the compounded cost of racism and sexism.

Or I think for those who are familiar with the literature, the quantification of massage noir.

So this is the idea of the pink tax that many people know, right?

So for those who might not know, the pink tax says, you know, if there's two goods that are similar being marketed to men and women women are going to pay a higher price and there's like sort of mixed evidence on this now where certain products have that kind of pink tax applied to them like shampoos and conditioners but others don't right so the double tax the idea here is to think about it through a broader context, right?

I think a lot of times people will only focus on what we consume, but a lot of times the double tax or just costs that we face as human beings in general show up in other ways in our lives.

And so in the book in particular, I'm looking at the whole lifetime of a woman, right?

So thinking about from the moment you kind of get in the mirror for the first time as an adolescent all the way through retirement and thinking about how those sort of costs accrue either during that.

period of your life or across a lifetime.

And so when we think about sort of how the double tax shows up, at least in this overall conversation that we're having about the beautiful big bill, there's a lot of different ways that, you know, we kind of touched on before, like around student debt and the idea of who actually gets an opportunity to go to school and then who actually gets an opportunity to benefit from those gains of going to school etc um but i also think that one thing to note here too is that if we're talking about child care in particular i know that we had mentioned planned parenthood before one of the most radicalizing things that i came across as i was doing my research um for this book was just how expensive motherhood is and parenthood is in general.

Raising kids is a very expensive thing to do.

I think CNBC finds on average about a $300,000 investment.

And so when we're talking about the child tax credit being fundamentally designed to not benefit those who actually need support, like, I don't think you understand, like, what do you do in that situation, right?

That means that as an individual, as a parent, you might not eat.

right?

It means that you might be behind on your rent for a couple months because you're just trying to feed your kid.

I know that we had a conversation with somebody who, you know, was kind of telling me the story of how she was navigating motherhood.

But she said at one point, her cost for childcare was as much as her rent, right?

So we're talking like $1,600 a month for just taking care of a one, one-year-old, one kid, right?

And then also $1,600 a month for your rent, right?

And so I think that when we talk about what this bill is unraveling, It's unraveling structures that support marginalized people and inevitably affects everyone.

I think there's a lot of people who seem to think that, well, if it's hurting that group, it's not hurting me.

Well, that group is part of society.

So, like, you can't just ignore a whole swath of people and think that it's not going to have any impact on you.

One thing we know from the research is that, for example, if you get rid of healthcare for folks who are poor, crime goes up, right?

There is some sort of relationship between that.

And I think it's less about, you know, people are inherently criminals and more about like you put somebody in a desperate situation, they might have to steal a deodorant or two to survive.

So I think like a lot of this is really about humanizing women of color as sort of the,

I would say, benchmark of progress, saying that, you know, when things hit us first, they usually hit us hardest.

And there's a lot to learn from what's coming at us before it hits the rest of society.

Right now, for example, Black women's unemployment is rising.

This is a conversation that's happening kind of across the board in some economic circles and some policy circles.

But that's oftentimes, in my opinion, an indicator, right?

Because a lot of times when we see black women's unemployment rising, there's some sort of economic crisis that's either coming or it has just passed.

And so, again, using sort of the double tax as a way to say, okay, here are the costs that women are facing.

Here are the costs that women are disproportionately dealing with across different areas of life, motherhood, caregiving.

We think about retirement, right?

All of these different areas are where racism and sexism can compound to create uniquely terrible economic situations for women.

And a lot of times these women, especially women of color, are the backbones of their community.

So this is sort of a couple examples of how the double tax shows up.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Another major shift that both of you have referenced is around students and student loans.

And this, I think, intersects both on the conversation of generational capacity, but also on communities of color.

So I'm going to start with you, Natasha.

Can you talk a bit about how these new caps on how much students can borrow for graduate school and how much parents can take out to help cover tuition, how this will impact both graduate and undergraduate students, especially those from low and middle income families, particularly in light of the generation that's rising now.

Yeah, and you, we kind of know what the choice is, and Anna described it very clearly and starkly, which is you are making it harder for certain types of populations to be able to get access to higher education.

And what we know in this country is that, and not just in this country, we know, and we know it based on a vast array of economic evidence and papers written in every country by every type of scholar, that

having those educational opportunities is one of the most important sort of vectors of upward mobility.

So there's this, it's the work is literally called, it's like things like moving to opportunity and pathways for success.

And it is about how when you take kids and you put them into environments where they're able to have access to some of these types of institutions, it's not just by the way that they learn a lot in school and they take classes and they graduate and get better jobs.

It's also just the network.

And Anna and I are both very lucky, as are you, Stacey, to have had the opportunity to spend time at some of these places.

And they really do change the trajectory of your professional career, even if you were on a terrific, amazing trajectory, just because you're exposed to so much.

And our universities are what makes this country great.

And it's a separate topic for a different podcast, perhaps.

But I think the sort of assault that we're seeing on higher education on a host of dimensions is going to have real ramifications for future generations and for the success of this country writ large.

The bill also sort of tucked in to one of the like a thousand some pages, delays regulations that are aimed at helping students who borrowed to fund an education that they ultimately didn't receive, right?

They got deceived by an institution either because the school lied to them and said, some of these for-profits said that actually, you know, if you come to our school, you're going to have access to these types of jobs and these types of programs after you graduate, or because the school closed.

So the school shut down, borrowed to fund an education and didn't ultimately receive it.

And the result of that is that these borrowers who have invested in themselves and tried to seek exactly these types of opportunities for advancement, not only aren't they getting it, we're also taking away some of their recourse to be able to push against some of those structures that have prevented them from advancing in that way.

And I think that's a mistake.

And it's a mistake that is one of many that is being made recently.

Things like decimating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and some of these like choices where it's like, if you have a scale of like tilt towards money to interest and tilt towards consumers and consumer protection and marginalized populations and all the groups that are most vulnerable in society, it's just sort of frustrating that we're making the choice not to invest in them, but the choice to divest from some of the structures that have been opportunities for them to have access to the types of protections that we'd like to see in our society.

And I want to tie these two pieces together by moving to the conversation about Medicaid, because again, the question is who are we privileging and who are we punishing and how are we deciding?

And I know that there is a lot of narrative about the megabill's impact on Medicaid and that's had the lion's share of attention and rightly so.

But again, embedded in the details are some questions that we really need to dive into.

So for example, my home state of Georgia is emblematic of just how disingenuous and harmful the policy of work eligibility is.

The rules that would change basically require that you have to work, volunteer, attend school, or participate in job training for at least 80 hours a month to qualify.

But if 60% of African-American students and about half of Native American and Hispanic students rely on Pell Grants to go to school, they can't get that higher education.

If women who are disproportionately reliant on food services can't afford to eat and can't afford to take care of their kids, that has an impact.

And so what we're seeing are rules that on their face seem to suggest something that is conservative common sense, but the policy isn't designed for help.

It's actually designed for harm.

And we know, for example, that requiring proof of work to access health care, it sounds reasonable, but the majority of Medicaid recipients who are able to work are in fact working.

So, Natasha, can you talk a little bit about why this work requirement is going to result in millions losing access to health care?

And then I'm going to come to you, Anna, to talk a bit about the communities that are disproportionately supported by government-funded health insurance.

The Congressional Budget Office put out these estimates of how many millions of people are going to lose health coverage as a result of the bill.

And they concluded that the bill by itself, before you even get to the failure to expand some of these expiring tax credits this year that are also going to kick millions off of insurance, but the bill by itself is going to kick about 11 million people off of health insurance and over the next 10 years.

And what CBO said sort of very explicitly, and the work that I've done is kind of doubled down on this, is that that's not like those people weren't eligible for Medicaid, weren't meeting requirements, weren't showing proof of particular circumstances.

Those people are people who are in fact eligible for coverage, but the paperwork burden that is being imposed on them is what is ultimately going to drive them off of having access to this health insurance.

And there was a great piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago that was authored by a few individuals who had been very close to the Arkansas work requirements that are kind of like a precursor to the conversation that we're having, we're having.

And they made that point like very explicitly.

I mean, these are sort of, it is not the popular narrative of there are all of these unworthy, uneligible Medicaid recipients and we need to deal with sort of waste fraud and abuse in the program.

And this is a vehicle for us to be able to do that.

It's just so far from reality on the ground when you actually start to unpack the challenge of navigating our health system and navigating the ways in which it tends to impose these very challenging administrative tasks on exactly the group of people who is like thinking about like, how do I get food on the table?

How do I go to these job interviews?

Like it just the time tax involved on that population ultimately is gonna be what results in people, millions of people not getting access to health insurance and then having worse health outcomes.

There's a lot of.

economic research that says that like, it's not just like worse, ambiguously worse.

It is like 100,000 people plus are going to die in the next 10 years of preventable deaths because of these Medicaid cuts.

And I just find, again, it's like, what is the,

what is the policy goal that we are trying to advance?

If the goal is to decrease fraud in Medicaid, I am sure there is fraud in Medicaid and I'm sure steps can be taken to do just that.

But the choices that are being made in this bill are not reflective of that particular objective.

They're doing something else.

And I think it's important for policymakers to ask themselves how comfortable they feel with the something else that they're doing.

And as one piece of evidence that maybe they're not that comfortable as you saw senators like Josh Hawley say, like, I passed the thing, I voted for it, but I'm going to spend the next few years trying to make sure that these cuts never kick in

because I know.

the type of devastation that they're going to bring to my constituents.

And I think that's just a reality.

And my hope for the legislation, frankly, is that these things are time loaded to be after the midterm election.

And I hope that we find ways to scale back a lot of the harm that's been done before it can do maximal harm.

Though, of course, it's already started and families are already bearing the burden as they think about what this means for them

now that the bill has been passed.

And Anna, we know that women disproportionately carry the weight of unpaid labor.

So how will the proposed Medicaid changes affect women who've cut back on paid work or who've become caregivers to manage these responsibilities?

Yeah.

So I think you just laid it out really nicely, right?

This idea that older women tend to be the ones who are caretakers.

So like the average caretaker in America at this moment is about, you know, 50 years old and is taking care of their, you know, mother or their aging parent.

And so this idea of

who bears the burden of care,

how that's exasperated by the loss of healthcare means that this now just becomes another thing that as a caretaker, you have to worry about.

So not only are you not getting paid because you are taking care of a loved one or a child, but you are now also having to worry about their care and also worry about your own, right?

And as you just mentioned, the entire care infrastructure in this United States is very reliant on older women and women more broadly.

And so what happens if all the caretakers are sick, right?

Because they can't get to a doctor's office or the only way that they can get care is going to an emergency room, which might have long wait times.

That means that not only might their loved ones be impacted directly, but also, you know, how that might trickle down across the board, it means that folks in their communities might be impacted as well, right?

And so I think when we talk about, you know, older women in particular who are really bearing the brunt of the caregiving responsibility, and also I would even say mothers as well, our question should be, you know, what role do we want women to play in the U.S.

economy, right?

Because, you know, we'll talk about, you know, call to actions later on, but, you know, cutting healthcare for individuals who are taking care of an aging population, especially the population that we know is going to be benefiting from potentially Social Security, which also might see cuts in the future,

but also, you know, other sort of forms of retirement income.

What exactly are we trying to do here, right?

Are we trying to ensure that those people make it to the end of life with dignity, with respect,

with their wholeness intact?

Or are we saying that those people are disposable and the people who also take care of them are disposable as well?

And again, like going back to the double tax, this does cut across race as well, right?

So if we're thinking just about who tends to be enrolled in Medicaid, Black folks are disproportionately represented, Native Americans are disproportionately represented, Asian Americans are disproportionately represented, and Latinos and Hispanics are also disproportionately represented.

And funny enough, these same groups tend to have less income to begin with, right?

When it comes to being older and being in a position where they can even provide care at the level that they really want to, there's a lot of sacrifices being made that also impact them downstream, right?

So you're maybe pulling from your 401k or other accounts that you would typically use to build wealth for yourself and for perhaps your children, but now you're using that perhaps to take care of your aging parent because medical bills aren't cheap, right?

All of this together kind of creates a perfect storm for especially older women of color who are finding themselves in caretaker roles to sort of bear the brunt of what crisis this bill specifically is creating.

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Okay, so guys, I'm gonna bring us to the last couple of questions, having had this very uplifting conversation.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

Look, this is incredibly important.

And the reason I frame it that way is that, as you both really, I think, know profoundly, there is a lot of fear among younger generations, among marginalized communities, about how this dramatic, conservative shift in educational and economic orthodoxy will impact their future.

I mean, we, we as a nation just watched our leaders decide to say that certain populations will not only not be benefited, we will take specific action to make their burden harder in order to benefit the wealthiest among us.

And this is for a time when we are living amongst huge uncertainty and the tools that Americans have relied upon for decades have been dismantled.

And the advice that we used to get just doesn't apply and certainly won't apply in the years ahead.

And so we asked Gen Z and some young millennial staffers around our offices, what would you want to hear from two economic experts like yourself?

So I'm going to pitch the first question to Anna,

which is, you know,

the ability to own a house, to raise a family, the affording, to afford the rising cost of child care seems next to impossible.

And you all have explained just how difficult it is.

How should this generation think about the ability to do this in the future?

Is it possible?

And if not, what should they be thinking about, talking about doing right now?

Yeah, this is a loaded question.

Oh, absolutely.

Partially because I'm part of the generation that y'all asked.

And if I'm being honest, like, I don't know, right?

Like, so I'm still a PhD student.

So I think a lot of what I'm going through right now is discovering the answers answers to that.

What I do know is I think, I think community is going to become very critical in the years to come.

And so what I mean by that is, you know, one thing we're hearing a lot about increasingly is the presence of tenant unions.

So if you're a Gen Z staffer or just a Gen Z person like myself, and you're renting an apartment, and your apartment has the option of unionizing its residents, join the union, union, right?

We love unions in this house, right?

Unions are associated with higher wages, better worker benefits, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think it would potentially translate to your own living space.

So I feel like for me, I would say tenant unions, finding ways to sort of source care in community, right?

Because the reality is like these are policy choices as Natasha has pointed out.

And these policy choices are going to have implications for our generation.

And our generation obviously obviously will have, you know, opportunities at some point to hopefully like reverse a lot of these policy choices.

But in the meantime, we have to mitigate harm.

And you can't mitigate harm that's being done at a societal level as an individual, right?

You have to get into community.

You have to find ways to sort of insulate the sort of the impacts or make sure that the impacts are not hurting you like alone.

So making sure that you're in community, plugging into your food pantry, you know, volunteering at your local Planned Parenthood, donating to your local Planned Parenthood, making sure that your local stations, for example, where you can get reliable news, right, are staying funded.

I think these are all sort of ways that I would say,

kind of ensure that even though these harms are coming our way, we won't be swept away by what's coming.

Awesome.

And can I give you one sentence too, which is that we have a massive housing?

This is a supply problem.

Yes.

We have a massive housing crisis in this country.

And that housing crisis has resulted in skyrocketing rents in particularly parts of the country that have the most obvious pathways to economic opportunity.

So, like, I can't tell you precisely what the solution is to the problem, but I think we all need to be honest that there is a supply shortage.

And when there's a supply shortage, you need to find ways to build and invest.

And how exactly you do that?

Is it abundance?

Is it something like abundance?

Those are big questions that policymakers are going to have to grapple with.

But the answer is supply.

Yes.

Well, that is a perfect segue to Natasha, your question.

So, this person said, All I get on my TikTok feed are these rise and grind influencers that constantly talk about maximizing my paycheck by investing my savings.

At first, I was really annoyed and ignored all of them.

But now I'm starting to think that investing might be the only way I can actually accumulate wealth.

Separately, there was a question that said, You know,

how do I avoid falling into a debt hole?

So

should they start investing?

And if so, how?

But the last line of the question is, is our generation doomed?

So let me be cause for some optimism, I hope, which is that

this, your generation is not doomed.

And in fact, the world is a remarkable place.

And like, I just think we haven't talked much about Stacey on this podcast, but, and I don't want to over, we know so little right now, but we, Anna and I, in the work that we do, the ways in which artificial intelligence is just fundamentally revolutionizing what it means for me to be an economist is pretty remarkable.

And tasks that used to take me months take five minutes.

You know, it's just like, I've already, I'm already watching it in my own work and in my colleagues' work kind of fundamentally shape the the nature of our productivity in ways that it feels like is going to be, is going to reverberate on the economy writ large, that is going to have its own a whole host of other problems.

You know, it's going to, I have yet to hear a super compelling answer to the question that if AI is in fact going to automate lots of different types of jobs across the labor market, then what happens?

You know, and what do we do?

And how does society grapple with that?

But it's a pretty sort of transformational moment.

And I think with transformational moments come remarkable opportunities.

Should we be able to seize them and navigate them with the care to some of the populations that we've gotten to talk about this afternoon with due care?

As a finance professor, I should be like,

professionally, I should tell you that we try very hard not to give actual investing advice because there are different types of experts you will want to consult for those questions.

But I will say that a thing that future, that

future generations like should grapple with and understand.

And I think as we were talking about a little bit, call to action, something I've always thought is important.

And I can give you another one, but I'll give you one right now.

I think like basic financial literacy is something that used to be emphasized in the American education system earlier on.

In fact, like it used to be, I feel like when I hear from older generations, they dealt with things like balancing checkbooks and thinking about how to pay your taxes and all of these sort of practical finance questions were things that you grappled with when maybe you were in high school or in college, you felt like compelled that you needed to learn about all of that.

And I think in our generation and certainly in Gen Z, a lot of that type of literacy, it does feel like we're grappling with in these like snippets and sound bites in ways that don't necessarily present to you a super fulsome picture about what you need to know to be able to like navigate the world as an adult entering the labor market.

And so my plea for future generations and my generation, frankly, and your generation, Stacey, is that we all invest some time in trying to acquire the types of skills that are going to make us really productive members of the citizenry because we have an understanding for how to think about financial savviness in a way that I worry we've all lost.

My last question for you is, what resources do you recommend for those who want to stay informed about how these policies will affect them, how these changes will affect them, and how they can plan for their futures accordingly?

And please plug the work that you do.

Oh, very happy to do so.

And thanks for giving me the opportunity, Stacey.

I will say the work that my colleagues and I do at the budget lab at Yale is exactly oriented around trying to be able to trace out in pretty real time what the likely impact of policy choices that are being made at the federal level, be they

tariffs at high rates or higher rates than we've seen in the last century, be they aspects of the big beautiful bill, and be they future policy proposals that we hope to see in the space of child care and trying to invest in future generations.

What we try to do is try to sort of look at what the economic evidence tells us about the likely impact of some of those choices and really make clear to policymakers and make clear to real people, you know, what is going to happen or what the likely consequences are of some of the choice points.

And so I definitely, we have a ton of resources about many of the questions we've been discussing, like why you should care about deficits or what's going to happen as a result from distributionally as a result of the reconciliation package that I would encourage people to engage with and to give us ideas for others policies that you think that we should be spending some time trying to learn more about.

Awesome.

Natasha, thank you so much.

Anna, thank you so much for joining me today on Assembly Required.

Take care and go out and fix everything.

So happy to be with you.

Thanks, Stacey.

Thank you so much, Stacey.

It's an honor, as always.

Like so many of the issues that we tackle here at Assembly Required, thinking about the impact of the Trump tax and mega bill can be overwhelming.

But as we wait for elections, we still have the power to make a difference now.

Let's start by being curious.

Although tax policy can feel remote and complicated, it's kind kind of on purpose.

It's easier for politicians to control your money when you don't understand the rules.

So I encourage you to read Anna's book, The Double Tax, and follow her at It's Afronomics on TikTok and Instagram.

Number two, solve problems.

One impact of these bills is that state and local governments will have to take on more and more of the cost for federal failures.

So now is the time to understand how your state legislature works.

Already states are planning to cut programs or shut down hospitals.

So let them know you're watching.

Look up your state rep and state senator.

Then call and introduce yourself.

Ask for a meeting with you and your friends to discuss how they plan to protect you from these dangerous decisions.

It doesn't matter which party you voted for.

If they got elected, they work for you.

Remind them.

And then...

do good.

As this bill accelerates the cost of living crisis, consider getting involved in ways that might help foster your own security and help the most vulnerable in your community.

According to the organization Feeding America, SNAP already gives just $6.16 a day to the average person, which, as they note, is barely enough for a basic breakfast.

Now, these cuts will result in families having even less.

If you are most concerned about food insecurity, visit feedingamerica.org slash advocate slash snap to type in your zip code and learn about how cuts will impact your community.

And then consider donating if you are able and seek out food assistance programs where you live to get involved.

If you're worried about housing costs, find out if there's a tenants union available to you or consider creating one.

Visit the National Housing Law Project at www.nhlp.org and read the National Tenants Bill of Rights and learn more.

And also search our feed for our episode on tenants' rights.

It was one of our early ones.

To protect healthcare access, continue supporting Planned Parenthood as their funding remains in jeopardy.

And finally, to keep your community informed amidst massive cuts to public media, check out ways to support your local public radio station.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all of your favorite platforms.

And to meet the demands of the algorithm, please rate the show and leave a comment.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen and learn.

In the next few weeks, we're going to be talking more about the 10 steps to autocracy and how to fight back.

I'd love to hear more about what you're seeing on the ground, groups that are providing mutual aid, innovative neighbors doing extraordinary things, and issues you aren't hearing enough about.

If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Be careful out there and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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