Lately, Washington, D.C., has been obsessed with President Trump’s so-called “one big beautiful bill” (OBBB), which will transfer literally trillions of dollars from regular hard-working Americans to the so-called “billionaire class.”

Soon enough, Congress will doubtless be debating the second bigger and more beautiful bill, followed by the third even bigger and even more beautiful bill.

Trump’s basic motivation is apparently to do something nice for his fellow billionaires. Like anyone else, billionaires enjoy the feeling of having more money in their pockets, but it takes a huge amount of money to make a billionaire feel richer. Biden’s $1,400 COVID-era stimulus checks were meaningless to a billionaire. Even a million bucks means little to a billionaire. It takes multiple millions to make a billionaire feel richer.

Billionaires are a very small class: There are about 3,000 of them worldwide, according to Forbes Magazine. 900 of them are here in the United States. The USA is home to 30% of the world’s billionaires, even though we Americans are just 4.1% of the world’s total population. This is not surprising, since we have the world’s strongest economy.

Unfortunately, Trump has been destroying most of the things which made our economy the strongest in the world. We used to invest more than any other country in science and technology, but since January 20, 2005, not anymore. We still have the world’s greatest educational system, especially at the college and university level, but Trump has been systematically dismantling it. He is also trying to do away with democracy and the rule of law.

Trump views making billionaires richer as a desirable goal in and of itself. But he has not abandoned the traditional supply-side economic argument for making the rich even richer: i,e., that their wealth will trickle down to the rest of us in form of more philanthropy and more job-creation.

Trump and his henchpersons have ironically been actively been discouraging philanthropy, in two ways.

Firstly he has been defunding many of the institutions which are the most attractive targets for philanthropy, such as museums, hospitals, colleges and universities, etc. Just like us regular people, the super-rich prefer to give money to institutions which already have a solid base of support, including governmental support.

Secondly, his war on DEI makes any form of philanthropy politically risky, since just about any charity directs resources to helping those who have inequitably excluded from existing programs. Any effective charity inevitably supports the three things Trump hates most: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Trump and his henchpersons have also done little or nothing to create jobs. During the first few months of his reign of error, Trump fired thousands and thousands of federal workers — at least 60,000 and probably a lot more than that. In top of that, tens of thousands of other non-federal workers whose employment depends on federal funding have also lost their jobs.

The OBBB is unlikely to help either of New Hampshire’s two billionaires.

North Country resident Alex Karp (net worth $12 billion as of July 7, 2025) is the CEO of the big-data firm Palantir, which relies heavily on government contracts. Trump doubtless supports some of the initiatives which have made Palantir a multi-billion dollar company, but in general, he is not a big fan of collecting accurate data about what our government is actually up to.

Palantir’s 2024 annual report contains language to the effect that they will avoid doing business with clients who don’t support “our mission to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies,” which is blatantly inconsistent with Trump’s mission.

Karp has engaged in little or no visible philanthropy aside from the Palantir Foundation, which basically sponsors conferences and publishes a newsletter. However, he has donated several thousand dollars to various center-right political candidates and committees, none of whom are Trump supporters.

Keene resident Rick Cohen (net worth $19.7 billion as of July 7, 2025) is the CEO of two companies. He founded the warehouse-automation firm Symbotics, based in Massachusetts, and he also runs the family-owned C&S Wholesale Grocers. The OBBB is bad news for both of Cohen’s companies. The OBBB’s cuts in SNAP, also known as “food stamps,” benefits and other social safety-net programs will be disastrous for the many grocery stores served by C&S, and they will also be bad for Symbotics’ main customer, Wal-Mart.

The Cohen family’s visible philanthropy, by the way, tends to be “woke” and pro-DEI. The OBBB is bad for everyone. It isn’t even good for the 900 billionaires it was designed to help, with one exception: Donald Trump.

Timothy Horrigan is a state representative from Durham.