Fiscal policy may sound like the last word in dullness, but as the German sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid wrote in 1917, “The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), transformed from a concept straight out of the mind of Donald Trump into legislation passed by Congress on July 3 and signed into law the day after, is a study of just how powerfully ugly a piece of fiscal legislation can be. The “misleading ideology” that’s been stripped away is the pretense of Trump’s GOP to be a working-class party; it is more of a plutocrats’ party than ever.

OBBBA is undeniably big, clocking in at almost 135,000 words, which would work out to about 500 standard book pages. Beautiful it’s not. It makes the 2017 tax cuts, skewed to the very rich, which were slated to expire at the end of 2025, permanent; slashes Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), and other social programs; and massively ramps up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation machine.

A few details: There are the famous tax cuts Trump offered on the spur of the moment — no taxes on tips or overtime, nice for the beneficiaries but gimmicky and only of narrow application. It’s full of corporate goodies, like largely exempting domestic oil and gas drillers from corporate taxes, making private jets fully tax deductible in their year of purchase, and extending a nice tax break for Alaskan whaling captains (which helped buy Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote). It lifted a tax on gun silencers (which the National Rifle Association celebrated as a victory in the fight against financial discrimination). It expands school vouchers, key to the right-wing agenda of undermining public education.