Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget squeaked through the US House of Representatives last Thursday – a shiny populist package hiding a brutal class agenda. No taxes on tips! Bigger child tax credits! But look closer and the bill is a sleight of hand. The middle-class perks expire in 2028 – just as Mr Trump’s second term would end – while permanent tax cuts for the rich, and delayed cuts to means-tested welfare, entrench inequality. It’s not a budget. It’s a bait-and-switch. It turns Democrats’ fiscal caution into a liability – one that punishes their own base. Republicans understand what Democrats still don’t: deficits aren’t the danger. It’s what you do with them that matters.

This bill supercharges inequality: a $1.1tn giveaway to Americans earning more than $500,000 a year – funded by pushing poorer families off Medicaid and food assistance. It slashes green energy subsidies. Experts say it could add $3.1tn to the debt – but it’s more than millionaire tax breaks. It raises Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding by 365% for detention, 500% for deportations – fuel for Mr Trump’s crackdown.

It’s also trickle-up economics sold as working‑class salvation. Democrats voting against it now face the optics of opposing “tax relief for waitresses” – even though a third of such workers make too little to pay income tax and won’t benefit at all. The bill now moves to the Senate, where Republicans must juggle fiscal hawkishness on welfare with silence on pro-rich tax cuts – hoping voters won’t notice their hypocrisy. No filibuster looms, but any Senate changes must pass with a simple majority - and then survive the House, where even modest tweaks could alienate hardliners or upset fragile support.

But too many Democrats remain trapped by outdated budget dogma. While Republicans rack up deficits for the rich, Democrats cling to the Reagan-era Byrd rule and “pay for” logic – treating a 1970s economy as today’s reality. The former is a procedural constraint, but it was born of a political age obsessed with balanced budgets, and it continues to shrink ambition by demanding offsets for moral imperatives. In 2021, the most effective anti-child-poverty policy in decades expired because some Democrats fretted over funding it, despite record corporate profits.

The US needs to tax the wealthy properly – not least because rampant inequality is destroying democracy. But the economist Stephanie Kelton is right that the question about deficits isn’t so much “how big?” but “who benefits?” That’s the language Democrats need. Not budget sermons. Deficits should be for public purpose, not private plunder. Rather than scare stories about debt, Democrats should say America can run a deficit to fund healthcare, housing and green tech – not to bankroll authoritarian deportation squads or gift cash to the donor class.

The real risk isn’t rejecting Mr Trump’s tax‑and‑spend agenda – it’s countering it with arithmetic. Voters don’t want better calculations, they want better convictions. In 2021, Joe Biden urged conservative Democrats to break their addiction to “pay-fors” and embrace a politics of purpose – spending driven by values, not accounting gimmicks. Their refusal is partly why the party struggles with its message today. Mr Trump’s budget may blow up the deficit, but it also blows up the illusion that Democrats can win with numbers. The only way out of the trap is to fight not over how much the federal government spends but whom it spends it on.