00:00Well, let's talk now to David Dunn, the Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
00:06David, welcome back. So this bill, now Law of the Land, who are the winners and who are the losers?
00:14Well, politically, Trump is a winner in the sense of he dominates American politics, he dominates his party, he dominates Congress,
00:23and he's pushed through this extraordinary bill. But the bill is the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old,
00:32and the biggest sacrifice of America's future to its present, by the impact it'll have on poverty, on macroeconomic stability, and on climate change.
00:41So the Wharton Business School reckons that 60% of American population will be worse off,
00:47and the top 2% and 5% will be much better off as a consequence of this transfer of wealth through major changes in the tax policy.
00:58As you say, it impacts health care. Three-quarters of the advances in health care through the Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, will be reversed by this.
01:07It will have impacts on poverty by removing food stamps for the very poorest,
01:11and it will give massive subsidies to the oil, gas and coal industries at the expense of solar and wind and other renewables.
01:21So in many ways, it's completely regressive, and in many ways, it's very radical on a whole variety of fronts.
01:29The White House believes that these various tax cuts will help stimulate economic growth. Will it?
01:36Almost certainly not. What you're going to have is higher energy costs, as a consequence of the subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.
01:46You're going to have higher borrowing by adding $3.3 trillion to the deficit and to the massive interest that America pays on that.
01:56America now pays more on interest payments than it does on the defence budget.
02:01It owes so much money. And of course, it's also going to have an impact on the Americans where they pay their mortgages as a consequence of the higher cost of borrowing.
02:10So in many ways, across the board, this is a thing which will hamper the American economy in the short term and the long term,
02:19because fundamentally what it does is borrow from future taxation, which is inevitable, given the size of the American budget deficit that this adds to.
02:29This bill narrowly passed through U.S. Congress, and the polls suggest the bill was deeply unpopular with many Americans.
02:39Will this come back to haunt President Trump and his party at the midterm elections?
02:48Well, the extraordinary thing is with Mr. Trump, despite the fact that he talked about these tax cuts,
02:52Americans seem to be enamoured by him and prepared to vote for him or his party, no matter what the consequences are for them.
03:01There is a provision in this bill that actually the cuts to Medicaid and other things like that don't happen until after the midterm elections.
03:08So they have deliberately timed it, recognising that there would be potentially political costs to it.
03:14He's almost as if he's calculating the impacts of this bill won't affect him because he's constitutionally not allowed to run for office for a third term.
03:23So there is a recognition in the way in which the whole thing has been structured, that actually once people wake up to this, that they may not like it.
03:31But in the short term, he's prepared to reward his friends in the oil and gas industry, reward the billionaires who benefit enormously from this,
03:41and to actually punish the people who voted for him by the way in which these will impact on the majority of the American population.
