Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' finally passes through congress
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No. Yes. SAP Concur helps your business move forward faster. Learn more at Concur.com. Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Roger Hearing, and on this edition, Donald Trump's huge finance bill gets the final go-ahead from Congress. So what will it mean for the US economy and for those poorer Americans who get help from federal benefit programmes?

Also today, another Superman movie, but do audiences really want a fourth Man of Steel? Or has Hollywood just run out of ideas? And as the Oasis reunion tour kicks off, we look into the merchandise that could earn them millions. I've just bought a poster, but we had a good look around. There's lots of different T-shirts and Adidas things and many bucket hats. So no, good for them. Make your money while you can.

But first, Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill has passed its last legislative hurdle and the massive $3.4 trillion package of tax and finance measures will soon become law. The president's expected to sign it on Friday, which is, of course, the U.S. Independence Day holiday.

It was a narrow vote in the House of Representatives, 218 to 214, and there was a lot of last-minute arm-twisting among Republicans. But Mr Trump got what he wanted, despite the top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, making the longest speech in the chamber's history. This was how he rounded it off after more than eight hours. Whatever happens today as it relates to this one big ugly bill, if my Republican colleagues decide that, once again, Mr Speaker...

You're simply going to make the decision to serve as a reckless rubber stamp of President Trump's extreme agenda? I still have faith in the United States of America. I still have faith in the United States of America. I still have faith in the United States of America. That was Hakeem Jeffries. Well, then the vote was taken, the gavel fell, and the bill was passed. On this vote, the yeas are 218, the nays are 214. The motion is adopted.

And what of President Trump? Well, he said the bill would turn the US into a rocket ship. He was speaking in the last few minutes as he prepared to board Air Force One on his way to Iowa. He was asked what message he will be giving to the people of the US tomorrow when he says he will sign this bill into law. Well,

Well, I think it's going to be really a message of proudness. You're going to be proud of your country because our country is doing fantastically well. The economy is great. You saw the stock market today. So we're signing at about 5 o'clock. And at about 5 o'clock, we're going to have B-2s and F-22s and F-35s flying right over the White House.

And the Speaker and I and John Thune, we're all there together with most, I think, most Republican senators in Congress, men and women. And it's going to be a great day. So we'll be signing with those beautiful planes flying right over our heads. Donald Trump. So what is in this final draft of the bill that's got through? What will it mean for Americans? I'm joined now by Erin Delmore, our North America business correspondent. Join him on the line from New York.

Erin, the final bill, because we know it got amended in the Senate, it then was heavily argued over, of course, in the House. What is in it and what's its significance?

Well, there are going to be some big changes for American households and how those changes affect each household really depends on where on the tax bracket these families fall. You know, it's a tax and spending bill. And overall, with this bill, tax revenue is expected to fall significantly over the course of the next decade. And that's the revenue that really funds a lot of these big government programs. So there were different versions passed by the Senate and by the House, you know,

The first thing it does is make permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Spending Act, which was the signature legislative achievement of President Trump's first term and was broadly popular with his voters and something that helped drive him back to the White House.

You know, there are some bonuses in here for senior citizens, for parents, for newborns, for people who go to private school. There are some tax breaks for tipped income and for overtime pay and for car loans, things like that. But it makes enormous slashes to some government programs like Medicaid, which is a health care program, and food stamps, which is food assistance for America's poor.

poorest residents. It actually is estimated to increase the poverty level and the level of the uninsured dramatically in the United States. It also ends some tax credits that are tied to clean energy and makes some really big changes to federal student loans. So this is really bound to hit a lot of people in different ways. But high earners benefit by seeing their taxes cut, while low earners really see their own food assistance and their own health and health care

hit. OK. And one of the key lines that certainly alienated President Trump's former supporters, in fact, like Elon Musk, was the amount it's going to add, at least it's claimed it will add, to the U.S. national debt. U.S. national debt around $36 trillion, something of that order. And the expectation is this will add $3.4 trillion to that. Is that because the taxes are coming down? Is that what's doing it?

Yeah, it is just it's a deficit. It is just the difference between those two figures. And, you know, something that strikes me is that it is something that hurts younger people more so than older people. Basically, when you see the numbers grow that much, it becomes a longer term problem and tends to affect the population.

Social Security, other entitlement programs, their viability into the future, which is something that younger people would be more concerned about than older people who have some assurances in place now, albeit some slight ones. And it's also something that means, you know, younger people could face higher mortgage rates or higher tax rates, things like that.

It is something that we have seen Congress kick the can down the road on before. And while there are some hardline Republicans who have run entire campaigns on making sure that those levels don't increase, they seem to be willing to move over on that position today. And what about Donald Trump supporters, perhaps the MAGA people, as they call them, perhaps people at the lower end of the income bracket? Is this the point where they're going to see that some of the things they've voted for may not be entirely to their advantage?

Yeah. And the thing is that it will take a little bit of time for these changes to go into effect. You know, certainly we will see some and then that could portend some kind of reaction around the midterm elections, which happen in just about two years here. But at the same time, some of these take a time to go into effect. You know, broadly speaking, Americans tend to be hard on programs that they don't think they benefit from.

from but might not know how federal funds touch the programs that they do use. And this is something that I've been reporting for years and years. You know, when you talk about health care centers toward less developed areas in the country, a lot of those are federally funded in places where the parties that tend to extend more of that funding are deeply unpopular. It's a bit paradoxical. But when people see their health care or they see their food assistance touched, yeah, they have a reaction to it. But

But Republicans and people in Congress of both parties know that those groups tend to vote at less high rates. We'll see how that plays out in the voting booths, of course. Thanks so much for that, Erin. Thanks for being with us, Erin Delmore there. Well, one of the sticking points for the opponents of the bill, as we talked about there, is the amount it's likely to add to the U.S. national debt. $3.4 trillion, it said.

over the next decade. The debt, as I mentioned earlier, already over $36 trillion. But does it matter? Does debt matter when you have the world's currency in your hands, when you are in the most powerful economy? Joining me is Ken Fisher, founder of Fisher Investments, a billionaire investment analyst and a columnist with the New York Post. Ken, thanks for being with us here on World Business Report. Does it matter? Does it matter how much debt the U.S. has?

No, yes and no. But first, let me just say, I think almost everyone gets this completely backwards. I mean, completely backwards. Make no mistake about it. Despite everything that was said, which is true, it's also meaningless and misleading. Recall what this does, assuming that it's stuck to for the 10 years. And if it isn't stuck to for the 10 years, then the $3.4 trillion number doesn't apply.

What it does is it actually shrinks the repayment value of the cumulative debt over the 10-year period by approximately 12%. Let me take you through that. First, the Federal Reserve is committed clearly, articulately to 2% a year inflation.

On the $37 trillion of extant debt, that's $740 billion a year of decreased value of the debt. The debt is issued in dollars of the day and paid back in deflated dollars from inflation.

So the $740 billion over 10 years becomes $7.4 trillion, and the $3.4 trillion you talk about over the 10 years gets depreciated by about $300 million.

In dollars. OK, let me let me pin you down on this. What you're saying is the effect of a changing value of currency, in effect, is what will make it less painful for America. But nonetheless, it's still an enormous amount of money for a country to have as a debt, isn't it? No, no, no. You're wrong.

It's less than what we have now by about 12% in real money value at the time. Yeah, but 12% less than what you have at the moment. It's shrinking the debt. 12% less than what you have at the moment is still an awful, I mean, it's 36 trillion at the moment.

But that's really not the point that matters. The point that matters is what's the interest rate on it? What's the carrying cost of the debt relative to either U.S. government tax revenue or U.S. GDP? And those numbers aren't different at all, let's say. I mean, they're just right where they were in the early 80s and into the early 90s. These numbers have not – I mean, they went down, they go up, but the fact of the matter is –

Those decades back were not some form of a crisis. This is not some form of crisis for U.S. long-term interest rates to be much higher than they are. I mean, their long-term interest rates are where they were a year ago. They're where they were literally 20 years ago. And the fact is this is not some crisis. It's not some big amount. The number 36 trillion or add a few trillion sounds crazy.

big because big numbers scare people, but the actual affordability of it is quite reasonable. Okay, Kent, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for being with us. Ken Fisher there of Fisher Investments joining us here on World Business Report.

Well, while there is a lot of anxiety over what's been going on with the bill and how it's going to affect, what's not really clear is how it's going to affect the economy overall. But there are people who say it's something that can be dealt with and that could actually help the economy and perhaps, as Donald Trump said, give it a rocket ship push. I've been speaking to David Seif, who's Nomura's chief economist for developed markets. Will it help boost growth?

The first thing is we have to think of what would happen if nothing were to pass. If nothing at all were to pass, then most of the 2017 Trump tax cuts would expire at the end of 2025. And that would lead to one of the biggest tax increases, probably the biggest in U.S. history, and probably push the U.S. into recessions.

Beyond simply renewing the tax cuts, there isn't actually all that much in this bill. So what you're saying then, David, is it's better than nothing, but that's not a huge endorsement in a way, is it? There's a chance maybe once every four to eight years for Congress to pass and the president, whoever the president is, to put some big legislative agenda through. Are there things that you would want to be in this bill that aren't

Many of the deficit hawks who objected to this bill, the Freedom Caucus, some of the more right-wing Republicans, their objections were that there was an opportunity to put the U.S. on the path to fiscal sustainability with this bill, and that opportunity was not taken.

And that could have come in many forms. You know, they certainly would have wanted it to happen through even steeper spending cuts than this bill has. They really are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively mild spending cuts, although they could affect a certain number of people quite severely. Or, of course, they could have come in the form of underpayment.

of phasing out some of the tax cuts, even if they didn't expire all at once. And really, neither of those takes place. No major spending cuts in a thing that would be really of first-order importance to the US economy or budget, and certainly no tax increases in here of any significance. Yeah, what I'm going to take away from what you're saying is that this bill could do some good in terms of extending the various tax cuts you're talking about. But apart from that,

It is going to increase the national debt and could be a lot better than it is. Is that a rough summary? It certainly increases the debt versus doing nothing and allowing all these Trump tax cuts to expire. I don't think it really would be fair to say it increases the debt versus what was expected in a major way. And that debt is also going to go down, or deficit go down a little bit due to tariff revenue. But I do think it misses the chance to put the U.S. on a

more fiscally sustainable path. And so it's not so much that the bill does good or does bad. It's that the bill sort of misses the chance to do quite a bit of good, I would say. And I think that's my single biggest takeaway from it. And that was David Seif of Nomura.

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You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service. Let's have a look at what's been going on in the other elements of the U.S. economy. And there's been some very interesting figures that have come out about U.S. jobs. Hiring in the U.S. defied expectations with 147,000 jobs added in June. That's according to the latest figures. The gain much bigger than the 110,000.

that analysts had predicted with government and health care, the sector's driving the rise. Unemployment itself declined to 4.1%. That's down from 4.2% in May. Let's see what that means. I'm joined by Dana Peterson, chief economist and leader of the Economy, Strategy and Finance Centre at the Conference Board in New York. Dana, thanks for being with us. How are you reading what the labour market is at the moment based on those figures and the context?

Labor markets started 2025 on a strong note, and it still is quite robust. We still see outsized gains in payrolls, even given the fact that the United States is at full employment and that there is balance between labor market demand and labor market supply. The unemployment rate is very low. And even when you look in the details of the unemployment rate, there are very few people who are discouraged. And when we do see the unemployment rate fall, some of that

does have to do with retirements. But overall, most people in the U.S. are working. Well, Dana, a couple of points that I guess people have been bringing up in relation to this. And one is that with the pressure on a lot of particularly Latin American, Mexican migrants not to come in, to go, to being pressured for not having the right documents, this in itself takes a lot of people out of the workforce. How does that affect it?

Well, absolutely. If you have workers who are not showing up, regardless of their immigration status, that's a big negative for a lot of companies, especially industries that rely on immigrant labor, such as construction, healthcare, also restaurants and hospitality.

as well as a lot of manufacturing and farming. So for those companies and those industries, this is a huge negative. But I also want people to understand that since 2010, millions of people have been retiring and

That's when the baby boomers started retiring. So really what's happening in terms of immigration is just, you know, icing on a really bad cake. The biggest issue that's facing the labor market in the U.S. is the fact that you have all these retirements that's generating labor shortages.

And deportations and uncertainty about immigration status just makes that dynamic worse. And one other factor that has been talked about probably too early to see it, I guess, is what AI is doing to all this, because there's been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence reducing the number, particularly in the tech area, of people that are needed for the jobs that are there. Are you seeing any evidence of that?

Well, the tech sector has been downsizing for several years. During the pandemic, they probably overhired. And so they spent some time rightsizing. And now they're looking at AI as a way to maybe eliminate some tasks and maybe even some jobs. But overall, most people...

will not be negatively affected by AI. When you look at tasks, AI can help you do things, but it can't do everything. And so it makes people much more productive and others, either it's not going to help them at all. And so it doesn't matter.

Whatever happens. Yes, Dana, thank you for being with us. Dana Peterson there of the conference board. Let's now turn to Kerry Leahy, the economist at Columbia University, who joins us as well. Kerry, let me ask you about a very interesting thing that came out today about the scale of companies, U.S. companies or companies, global companies. NVIDIA once more getting above Apple as the biggest market cap company in the world, the richest company in effect.

What does that tell us? They push back above Apple. Well, it's extraordinary. You have these hyper competitive individuals running these hyper competitive firms, fighting it out for being the largest firm of all time and goes back and forth in tech land. But those few firms that tended to break away from the pack. And so you get the size of these firms is just extraordinary.

And it's not only their ability to produce profits, which is unbelievable, but they're producing tremendous revenues, meaning that these companies are big and they're continuing to get bigger. So I think in one way, you know, Karl Marx was right. You know, the dinosaurs keep getting bigger and bigger. Absolutely.

And they are. I didn't think to hear you say that Karl Marx was right here on this program. But there we are. Kerry, one other thing. I mean, what about reaction to the bill passing? I know when it came through, it was pretty much after the markets had closed. But what reaction do you think the markets will have to the passing of this bill?

Probably not very much. The first point is that people had to assume some form of the bill was going to be passed and the additional items like reducing or eliminating taxes on tips is what's actually increasing the deficit even further. But there'll be little change to the economy because people's withholding is not going to change. So the typical individual is going to see virtually no change. The typical individual is going to get hurt in 26, 27, and particularly in 28. So the staggering of these changes, the big changes on Medicare, which is going to

hurt regional rural hospitals tremendously, probably isn't going to kick in for another two years. So ironically, and maybe depending on how cynical you are about the system, the Republicans know that and they're not going to be punished in the next midterm because the really bad stuff isn't going to happen. The good stuff is first, the bad stuff is later. We will look at that as it goes through. Kerry, thank you so much for being with us. Kerry Leahy there at Columbia University.

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Well, you get the idea. But how will the latest version of this classic superhero formula go down with today's generation? Is the genre becoming, well, tired? I asked Screen International's America's editor, Jeremy Kay. I think it's a risk because the film has this character that's been done before and we're in this time of superhero fatigue. But clearly the guys at DC Studios think they've got something special. From what I hear, it's pretty good. And the new actor, David Coren Sweat, who's pretty much unknown, is very likeable.

And you've got a great director in James Gunn making these films. So they think they've got the goods and they're going for it. Well, what you're maybe wrong or right about, I suppose, is what you call superhero fatigue. Just explain that. Well, this is the sense that in recent years, there's just been too many superhero films and TV shows. What happened was you saw in recent years that a few films were not getting the kind of box office that we would have expected from, say, Marvel Studios.

which has been a phenomenal hit factory over the last 20 years or so. And as I say, in the last few years, we've seen some films like The Marvels and earlier this year, even the latest Captain America film not perform as well as their predecessor.

Now I think they all want to make fewer of them, fewer and better. That seems to be the mantra in Hollywood now. So, Jeremy, is it a generational thing? Because, I mean, I spent much of the last 20 years taking my children to superhero movies. And, you know, they enjoyed them, but they've grown up, and I don't think they'll go see them again. And perhaps the new generation just isn't that...

interested in that sort of thing? Look, it's a good point. And I'm in the same boat as you are. And, you know, there's so much else these days that kids can read. Anime is incredibly popular. Other, you know, characters are really popular. But, you know, I think what they believe at DC Studios is that the superhero character itself is an evergreen character. As you know, the first one, the first Superman film with Christopher Reeve was, what, 1978 or something, so almost 50 years ago.

and if it speaks to a younger audience with great story writing, good acting, good effects, and maybe a message that people can latch on to, then it stands a chance. Jeremy Kay. Well, on to the world of music. Oasis, the reunion tour, finally kicks off in Cardiff this Friday. The band's been cashing in on the hype. Liana Byrne has been finding out demand for it is high.

Manchester, home to Oasis and the first Oasis Live 25 store, giving fans a chance to stock up on everything from bucket hats to branded cutlery sets. Five more stores will follow in cities hosting the band on its UK and Ireland leg. So what have fans been buying and how much are they spending? I've got a collection of vinyls. That's for a friend actually who lives overseas, so he's not going to be able to make the concerts. And then a couple of T-shirts for myself, iron-on prints.

The six retail outlets are part of a wider commercial push surrounding what is already being dubbed the most lucrative reunion tour in British music history. Barclays Bank has estimated fans could spend up to $1.3 billion across tickets, merchandise, hotel bookings and a lot more.

and food and drink during the tour. Charlotte Broadbent is the UK general manager for FAIR, an online wholesale marketplace connecting indie brands with indie retailers. She's seen a big spike in demand for Oasis-themed goods. We've seen sales up 150% year on year and actually outside of the UK,

And globally, that's up 230%. So it's really not just a UK phenomenon. It truly is global. And it's been so interesting to watch as retailers kind of place their orders ahead of the tour and buy into this trend.

The way that this band has captured hearts and wallets in the US was surprising to us. We've seen that Liam really is the fan favourite in our search data, whereas Noel is slightly behind on the trend, which I'm sure he wouldn't be happy about. About 1.4 million people managed to buy a ticket for one of the 17 UK gigs, with 10 times more trying their luck.

So for everyone else, there's always the merchandise. Dr Matt Grimes is a music business expert at Birmingham City University. Merchandise has become quite a big thing within the music business. I mean, it's always been there. It's a way of people keeping that connection with that particular event. There was this big issue around tickets.

and dynamic pricing and people not being able to get tickets. And clearly there's fans out there that want to be part of what's going on but may not have the opportunity to see them perform live. So it's a way that they can connect with what could be seen as pretty much a global event or global phenomena. So for fans, the final countdown has begun and so far the merch is going down well. The 41-day tour wraps up in Brazil on the 23rd of November.

But will the famously fractious band last the distance? Whatever happens, the fans will always have the merch. Leanna Byrne there reporting on, well, the commercial side of, well, it's all commercial, I suppose, the reunion of the band, but there's music there. Anyway, that's pretty much it from World Business Report for me and the rest of the team here. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening.

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