Blessed Are the Rich (For They Shall Inherit More Wealth by Budget Reconciliation)
We live in an imperial economy where Mammon wears a flag pin and fiscal policy is baptized in prosperity gospel. The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” signed into law last month has uniquely laid bare what’s always been true: the powerful in our country legislate their wealth by trampling on the poor. It’s a reverse beatitude for a reverse kingdom.
This bill has been described as “the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since chattel slavery.”1 It’s not a safety net for the “least of these,” it’s rather a golden parachute for the top 1%. Of course, the fact that wealth is again being legislatively transferred from the bottom to the top isn’t new for our economy or for its policymakers, but this one feels especially egregious and it’s necessary to call it what it is.
“A Kingdom Built on Corpses”
According to projections by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the bill will cost the lives of approximately 42,500 image-bearers of God. That’s real flesh and blood. People with names, families, chronic conditions, and prayers prayed in vain to politicians who only speak in dollar signs.
11,300 will die after losing Medicaid or ACA coverage.
18,200 will die from loss of drug subsidies.
13,000 will die in underfunded nursing homes, stripped of federal staffing protections.2
This isn’t policy, it’s triage by class where the poor are left in the waiting room while they bleed out. It’s a kingdom built on corpses and Jesus weeps. “Blessed are the merciful,” he said. “for they will be shown mercy.”(Mt 5:7) But mercy is evidently not en vogue since it doesn't translate neatly to quarterly market gains.
“Caesar feeding himself on the widow’s mites”
Economists at Yale’s Budget Lab did the math and they found that the bottom 20% of Americans will lose 2.9% of their income (about $700 per household), while the top 1% will gain 1.9% (or about $30,000 each).3
This is structural injustice codified into law. This is Caesar feeding himself on the widow’s mites. This is Robin Hood trekking Sherwood Forest for unsuspecting paupers whom he can rob for the king’s treasuries (giving tips to the sheriff of Nottingham about non-natives to the Forest along the way).
And it gets much worse. The bill is a tapestry of cruelty, woven with five more threads of injustice:
Rural healthcare gutted
More rural clinics will close (a phenomenon already apparent). Rural Americans (already on the margins in many ways) are often left with the health outcomes of a developing nation. For an ever-increasing number of people, no ambulance is coming when their kiddo is sick and can’t breathe.4
Tariffs taxed to Tiny Tim
To “offset” billionaire tax cuts, the Treasury Department is planning to continue the tariff regime. That means higher prices for food, clothes, medicine. The rich won’t notice but the poor will feel every cent.5
$3 Trillion for the deficit
Regular folks can’t eat GDP, but they certainly can pay interest on it. The increased debt will keep rates high, locking out an ever-growing number of working families from homeownership and saddling them with even more interest-bearing chains.6 That’s not even to mention the rise of predatory lending schemes targeting those without liquid assets, profiting off human suffering and desperation. Burdensome interest rates leading to unmanageable debt accumulation is the modern equivalent to Old Testament indentured servitude—it is voluntary bondage for lack of options.
Gulags for the undocumented
For our brothers and sisters in Jesus that don’t have their paperwork together? $29 Billion more to round you up and $45 Billion to build the concentration camps they will keep you in.7 God bless America?
Grease for the imperial war machine
The $150 billion “slush fund”8 gifted to the Pentagon takes its annual budget to over $1 trillion.9 A budget increase to a department that can’t account for over 50% of its $3.8 trillion in assets10 belies how crucial war-making is to our imperial economy. This is also the department directly providing between 69-79% of the imported weapons11 used to effectuate the mass starvation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian image bearers of God from Gaza, and ultimately, their genocide as a people.12
“Resistance by the communal embodiment of self-giving love”
Caesar demands worship and acquiescence, but it may be time for the community of Jesus to flip some tables. For the church, the time for vague hand-wringing is over. Jesus didn’t come to coddle billionaires or write tax codes. He came to “proclaim good news to the poor” (Lk 4:18) while pronouncing “woe to the rich who trust in their riches” (Lk 6:24-26). We simply “cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt 6:24). We can’t do it with our votes or our silence or our wallets.
Talk of resistance amongst the internet pundits is usually cheap but is sometimes dangerous. We’ve learned in the last half-decade that political violence is not monopolized by either pole, and it can be found often enough on the Right and Left. However, when we, the body of Jesus, speak of resistance, we mean resistance by the communal embodiment of self-giving love. We use no force and we tolerate no violence. Rather, we confront and resist the injustice of governments by leaning into our identity as an alternative political reality—what the early Christians called Ekklesia (the church). By showcasing what the restored human community looks like, we shame the injustice, cruelty, and backwardness of the world’s governments (ours included), and we expose the demonic forces that empower them (Col 2:15).
Faithful resistance looks like telling the truth. We the people of Jesus choose refusal to tow the party line for market (capitalist) interests. Orwell's Ministry of Truth may tell us to hustle, invest in crypto, store up futures, shore up shorts, and retire as young as possible, but Jesus says to “give to anyone who asks” at “no interest” (Lk 6:30, 35). A real Dad gives better gifts than Big Brother (Lk 6:35-36). We need to resist our values being reparadigmed by Wall Street’s gospel rather than Jesus’ Jubilee. If they already have been, let’s repent and subject ourselves to different influences (and influencers, perhaps).
Faithful resistance looks like doing justice in practical ways—voluntarily balancing the scales in our communities. We affirm with Paul that anything we happen to have is from God (1 Cor 4:7). It’s not morally virtuous to be stingy, it’s not humble to think we “earned” it, and it’s not maturity to increase in affluence. What if we tried some wealth sharing like the early church did (Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35)? What if we tried some debt erasure?13 What if we tried to make past wrongs right with fiscal repair?14 If our impulse is to think these sorts of things are cringe or irresponsible or worse, Marxist!!!, then it is likely our brains have already been rewired by wealth, and we’re in no position to serve God (Matt 6:24). If that’s us, let’s repent and get on with it.
Faithful resistance looks like standing with the poor and welcoming the stranger. It turns out neither are popular things to do right now if our goal is to be relevant to the world and its powers. We resist the allure of being identified as proud Americans, because we are priests of a different kingdom—that of the most high crucified God (1 Pet 2:9). Let’s provide more solidarity, give more aid, and ally with the disenfranchised and those fearing deportation. If that sounds leftist and not just correct, then again, I’m afraid tribal powers have converted us away from Christ’s sermon. After all, Jesus’ politics say that how we treat the stranger is how he sees us treating him (Matt 25:40). To support the incarceration and deportation of a Christian Guatemalan daddy of two is to support the incarceration and deportation of Jesus of Nazareth—should he show up in our neighborhood. If that’s us, let’s repent, read Matthew 25, and weep.
“The Kingdom belongs to the poor”
Blessed are the meek, not the market-manipulators. Blessed are the peacemakers, not the padders of the Pentagon's bomb budget. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not those who hoard bread and write it off as capital gains.
In the end, the Kingdom belongs to the poor, not the powerful (Lk 6:20). And if that makes us enemies of this economic order, then so be it. Revelation has a thing or two to say about resistance to an unjust economy, and the cost for doing so (Rev 13:16-17). We’ll take our stand with the one who was executed by empire, not subsidized by it.
Notes:
1 Sarah Anderson and Lindsay Koshgarian, “Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Represents the Largest Transfer of Wealth from the Poor to the Rich Since Chattel Slavery,” In These Times, July 16, 2025. https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-gob-big-beautiful-bill-snap-medicaid-cuts. Accessed August 3, 2025.
2 Anecdotally, having worked for one of the largest senior living companies in the US for over 4 years, I know first hand that the health and safety of our elderly loved ones are often dependent on the good will of one caregiver who decided to pick up a last-minute shift for an otherwise understaffed schedule. Understaffing is endemic in the industry, and legal provisions legislating certain staffing ratios are all that stands in the way of companies cutting it even thinner for the sake of labor cost reduction.
Statistics taken from Rachel M. Werner, Norma B. Coe, and Eric T. Roberts, “Projected Mortality Impacts of the Budget Reconciliation Bill,” Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania, June 3, 2025. https://ldi.upenn.edu/our-work/research-updates/research-memo-projected-mortality-impacts-of-the-budget-reconciliation-bill/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
3 Michael Tarnoff (Yale Budget Lab), “Distributional Effects of Selected Provisions of the House and Senate Reconciliation Bills,” Yale Budget Lab, June 30, 2025. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/distributional-effects-selected-provisions-house-and-senate-reconciliation-bills/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
4 Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, “'One Big Beautiful Bill' Would Batter Rural Hospital Finances, Researchers Say,” KFF Health News, June 12, 2025. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/rural-hospitals-battered-by-big-beautiful-bill-researchers/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
5 Thomson Reuters, “Treasury Hopes to Offset Tax‑Cut Costs With Tariff Revenue,” Reuters, April 30, 2025. https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/treasury-hopes-to-offset-tax-cut-costs-with-tariff-revenue/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
See also a piece written before the current administration's tariff regime, on how tariffs affect the poor disproportionately. Reuters, “Tariffs Tend to Hit the Poor Harder, WTO Says,” Reuters, September 9, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/tariffs-tend-hit-poor-harder-wto-says-2024-09-09/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
6 John Diamond & David Satterfield, “How Will Trump's Big Beautiful Bill Impact the US Economy?” Baker Institute. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/how-will-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-impact-us-economy. Accessed August 3, 2025.
7 American Immigration Council, “Congress Approves Unprecedented Funding for Mass Detention, Deportation,” July 1, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/press-release/congress-approves-unprecedented-funding-mass-detention-deportation-2025/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
8 Walter Pincus, “A Closer Look at the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ on Defense Spending,” The Cipher Brief. https://www.thecipherbrief.com/big-beautiful-bill-defense. Accessed August 3, 2025.
9 Erin D. Dumbacher et al., “Will Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Defense Spending Last?” Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/will-trumps-big-beautiful-defense-spending-last. Accessed August 3, 2025.
10 Lindsay Koshgarian, “The Pentagon Just Can’t Pass an Audit,” Colorado Newsline, December 6, 2023. https://coloradonewsline.com/2023/12/06/pentagon-cant-pass-audit/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
11 Amnesty International USA, “U.S.-Made Weapons Used by Government of Israel in Violation of International Law and U.S. Law,” April 29, 2024. https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-made-weapons-used-by-government-of-israel-in-violation-of-international-law-and-u-s-law/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
See slightly different estimations from Deen, Thalif, “How the US Made Israel's Military What It Is Today,” Responsible Statecraft. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-military-aid-israel-gaza-war/. Accessed August 3, 2025.
12 This can no longer be reasonably considered controversial. Israeli rights groups and an ever growing number of Jews and Israelis are loudly opposing the State's military actions. Of course, this is only echoing what nearly every human rights organization, the International Criminal Court, and 800 Holocaust and Genocide scholars have been saying now for well over a year.
See the statement and video produced by a leading rights organization in Israel. B’Tselem, “Our Genocide: Israel’s Assault on Gaza, 2023–2025,” B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, July 2025. https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide. Accessed August 7, 2025
13 Chris Marr, “Church Paying Off Members’ Payday Loans: ‘God Is Gonna Be Glorified,’” Yahoo Finance, July 15, 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/church-paying-off-members-payday-220000027.html. Accessed August 7, 2025.
14 Presbyterian News Service, “Cleveland Heights Church Focuses on Student Debt Relief and Repair,” Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), May 22, 2025. https://pcusa.org/news-storytelling/news/2025/5/22/cleveland-heights-church-focus-student-debt-relief-repair. Accessed August 7, 2025.
