MAJOR Changes To Your Money (Retirement, Tax Cuts, & US Economy)

As you may have heard, the big, beautiful bill was signed into law on July 4th, Independence Day 2025 by President Donald Trump. And there are a lot of things that are going to be changing, which we're going to go over in today's video. And I'm pretty sure I remembered to put the timestamps down below so you guys can jump to different sections that you would like to. And everything I'm going to talk about here are facts. These are things that really happened. These are changes that are going to be made due to this new law. And I am going to give some of my opinion along the way, as I always do. But just keep in mind, all this stuff is really happening. Whether you agree with it or not is another thing. So first and foremost, I think which is actually the worst part of the big, beautiful bill is that it raises the U.S. debt ceiling by $5 trillion, which is higher than the previously proposed $4 trillion. And that's going to have a massive, massive implication on how poor you are, because the more money that the government's allowed to borrow, well, then the more inflation that they're allowed to create, which makes the average everyday American more broke. So right off the bat, things are not starting off good when you look at it just from that perspective. And, you know, it's funny because Treasury Secretary Scott Besson warned that without an increase in the debt ceiling, that the U.S. could face a potential default as early as August of 2025. So essentially, we have gone so far down the wrong path as far as borrowing and spending more than we actually bring in in revenue in this country, that we're set to not be able to pay our bills as early as August of 2025 unless they approve more debt, which is just sad. It's almost like extortion, if you ask me. This is saying that we're so financially irresponsible that we need to be able to borrow an additional $5 trillion. Otherwise, the whole shebang is going to come to an end. Well, guess what? It's all going to come to an end anyway, sooner or later on this trajectory. Things aren't going to last much longer borrowing at this level of debt, guys. Already, the national debt is our largest line item in our budget. And what do they do? They double down and borrow more money and bring us into more debt and make it an even bigger problem. That's the government's answer to this problem. Anyways, let's move on because there's a lot to cover. Another part of the big, beautiful bill is the salt deduction cap was raised from $10,000 to $40,000 from 2025 through 2029, which is basically the state and local tax deduction. So if you live in a high tax state like here in California, for example, you can now deduct a higher percentage of the state income taxes that you pay up to $40,000 as the limit. If you earn $500,000 a year or less, this does give somewhat of a tax relief for people that live in higher tax states. It lowers the amount of taxes they will have to pay in federal taxes each year. Also, the current existing tax brackets from 12% to 37% of your income, depending on how much money you earn for the federal government, are going to remain unchanged, but they will adjust with inflation through 2029. So right now they're remaining the same, but they're going to continue to go up, which is another reason why the government doesn't want or will ever allow a situation where we see deflation. They need to have inflation because it's the only way they can keep this whole money printing scheme on the road. The 20% small business deduction was made permanent. So the pass-through businesses like S-Corps, for example, permanently retain the 20% deduction on qualified income. So at least they didn't take that away. Also, the threshold for reporting 1099 income increased from $600 a year to $2,000 annually. So this will help people that only earn maybe an extra $1,000 a year, but get a 1099 through somewhere. You don't have to report that anymore. Now, one of the big controversial changes with the big beautiful bill was the Medicaid changes that could leave millions of people actually uninsured. This new law imposes work requirements for able-bodied adults and mandates more frequent eligibility checks. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the changes could result in about 12 million people losing Medicaid coverage over the next decade. Now, I don't personally see the problem with this because it does say able-bodied. So if you are able to work, then why should you be able to get completely everything for free from the government? That just doesn't make any sense to me. You should have to have some sort of work requirements and be able to bring in some income on your own if you want to qualify for these benefits. Otherwise, you just get a lot of freeloaders that just want everything for nothing and the rest of us have to pay for it. Which brings me right to the next thing is there's also going to be work requirements for you to be able to qualify for food stamps or the SNAP program. The age threshold for work requirements and SNAP are currently at 18 to 54 years old. Well, this extends it from 18 to 64 years old, but there are some exemptions. And once again, it's for able-bodied people, people that can actually work. You are going to have to work at least 80 hours per month in order to qualify to be able to get these SNAP benefits or Medicaid benefits moving forward. Which honestly, I don't know why people are outraged about this and saying it's a bad thing because the reality is it forces people to be more responsible and not just completely take advantage of the system as it is. There's also been some major spending increases for Homeland Security and immigration. Check this out. You have 46 and a half billion for the border wall and related infrastructure. So I guess that was a lie when Trump said that Mexico was going to pay for that unless they're going to be writing us a check for 50 billion, which I don't see happening anytime soon. So it looks like we're going to be on the hook for that. You have 45 billion dollars for expanded immigrant detention capacity and you have 30 billion for ICE operations and it institutes a new $100 minimum asylum application fee. And initially it was a proposed for asylum applications to cost a thousand dollars. Which, you know, I have mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, if somebody is fleeing, you know, slavery, for example, from another country and they want to come here and start a better life and they're claiming asylum, that's all fine and good, but they should have some sort of vetting system. They need to be able to prove that that's actually the case. And I don't think that people should be allowed to stay here indefinitely while they're waiting for their case to be reviewed either. So charging a $100 minimum application fee might be a deterrent for some people to come here. I don't think it's going to be a major deterrent. If it was a thousand dollars, it might have been, but the final number was a hundred. There's also going to be a ton of rollbacks in the green energy sector as well as EV tax credits. I actually talked about this in my recent solar panel video for anybody who saw that video and it looks like these changes are happening. The new laws terminate the tax credits that were created by the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden. And the biggest one is the EV tax credit. That's actually going to be eliminated early. The $7,500 EV tax credit is over as of September 30th of 2025 and previously was scheduled to expire by the end of 2025. So anybody who wants to get that EV tax credit, you better go out and buy the car right now because you're pretty much running out of time. It also terminates the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which had finance projects aimed at cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but the existing contracts under the fund will remain in place. So I'm all for ending the EV tax credits, but getting rid of projects aimed at cutting pollution, probably not a great idea. Some people might think that I'm anti-environment or whatever just because I don't like electric cars, but it really has nothing to do with that. I just don't like the impracticality of the electric cars. For some people they might be practical, for me they're not. That's really it. The big beautiful bill also permanently raises the child tax credit to $2,200 per child. And there's a lot of changes in here for workers who get tips and things like that. The first thing is if you have a job where you get tips, workers are now allowed to deduct up to $25,000 of tip income and overtime wages from their federal taxable income if you're in one of these industries that relies heavily on tips, but the benefits do phase out for individuals earning over $150,000 a year who are single filers or people who earn over $300,000 a year who are married filers. And this is set to expire in 2028. So it is not permanent. Also overtime pay, which are wages that are over the standard 40-hour work week, can now be deducted from taxable income and the tax-free portion only applies to the overtime pay and it caps out at $12,500 per year for single filers and $25,000 per year for married couples. And it also phases out if you earn too much money. If you earn over $75,000 as a single filer, you don't get this. And if you earn over $150,000 a year as married filers, you don't get it either. So it really does incentivize people who don't earn as much money to actually get out there and earn more, to actually earn more of that overtime and get more tips from their job because now you have a big incentive to do that because suddenly you're able to keep a lot more of that income and not have to share any of it with Uncle Sam, but you will still have to pay your state taxes on that income. It doesn't exempt you from that, only from the federal income taxes. Now this next one is definitely controversial and I don't really understand what the point of this is, but they're giving newborn babies $1,000 savings accounts if they're born between 2025 and 2028. They're going to receive a $1,000 government-funded account and parents can contribute up to $5,000 annually to this account, but the funds must be used for first-time home purchases when they get older, college education, or starting a business. Those are really the only three uses you can use the money for and if you want to use the money for anything else, then that money will be taxed as ordinary income if not used for the qualifying expenses. So this whole thing just seems kind of pointless to me because giving every newborn $1,000 isn't going to be diddly-squat by the time they get old enough to use it. It's just going to cost the taxpayers a ton of money and responsible parents should be doing this for their children anyways and really they should be saving that money in gold and silver, not in inflated away dollars, but that's a story for another video. Also, people who have a lot of gambling losses aren't going to be able to claim as much of the losses as before, which I think is probably good because after all, gambling is gambling and you're just playing games with your money. So now the gambling losses are capped at 90% for tax deductions. So for example, if you lost $10,000 gambling and you win back $10,000, that's actually a $1,000 taxable event whereas before it would be a draw. There would be nothing. There would be no taxable event. So it's kind of a small punishment for people that just want to play with their money and just kind of use gambling losses as a way to not pay their taxes. This was another one that I thought was very controversial. The first time I read about it and the first time I talked about it here on the channel, but they're giving new deduction for interest on car loans up to $10,000 a year only for new cars that have final assembly in the United States, but the real savings is only going to be like $500 a year for most people. Check this out. This plane must have just landed. I don't think I've ever seen one of those before in my whole life. Now the reason I don't like this new tax deduction for auto loans is because it allows people to deduct up to $10,000 per year on interest payments for new car loans. So what is the incentive here? Buy a car you can't afford, right? With money you don't have. Go deeper into debt. Not a great thing either. Just so you can get that deduction on your interest for your taxes. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And to be honest, only people who are wealthy enough to be able to afford to be able to take advantage of that full $10,000 a year deduction and pay that much interest on a car are going to be the ones who can really take advantage of this anyways. So it's kind of throwing people a bone who already have a lot of money to go out there and finance a brand new car. And it disincentivizes people paying cash. To me that's just another one of the provisions of this big beautiful bill that's probably totally unnecessary. There's also a lot of changes coming down the pipeline for student loan borrowers. This new law imposes borrowing caps on graduate education which is aimed at reining in what lawmakers described as unlimited lending under the Graduate Plus loan program. Graduate students will now face a $100,000 borrowing limit and medical and law students will see a higher cap of $200,000 which is still an insane amount of money to go to school. And this is probably a good thing because the reason that college is so expensive to begin with is because of the unlimited borrowing potential for student loans. That's how we got to this situation where people now have six-figure student loan balances because the government has agreed to back student loans for quite some time. Prior to then, college was very cheap. Tuition was not expensive before you could get a student loan backed by the federal government. So that's why I think it's good that they are capping these limits but the limits are capped way too high. They should have actually lowered the limits quite a bit to incentivize college tuition to go down. So just kind of, you know, stabilizing the current situation we have where college tuition is still way too expensive and they're just kind of limiting how much more expensive it might get into the future. And even then, it might not limit the increases in tuition because private borrowers can come in and fill the void and give people an extra loan. But the biggest problem with all of this, of course, is how much it is going to cost. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $3.4 trillion deficit over the next 10 years. And of course, this is going to have a major impact on inflation, potentially. Now, I understand that when we have an increase in inflation it's because of an increase in the money supply. So even though this doesn't directly increase the money supply, it does increase the amount of debt that the government is able to borrow and go into which ultimately pushes more people to invest in hard assets, which pushes the price of those assets up. Things like real estate, the stock market, gold and silver, Bitcoin, etc. And of course, the critics are talking about how much the national debt will increase, which of course is a huge problem. Also saying that wealthy taxpayers will benefit disproportionately and low-income individuals may see higher costs or even reduce benefits in the case of Medicaid or SNAP benefits. And of course, the supporters are saying that the lower taxes will stimulate economic growth and the cuts will leave more money in taxpayers' pockets until they realize they have to fork out more money for everything, especially assets. Now, that's why I wanted to just kind of throw in a little bit of a real estate tangent here because if asset prices are to go up because of this big deficit spending, what does that mean for the future of the housing market now that prices are finally going to come down? Well, the honest answer is I don't know because I can't predict the future. I'm not a psychic. I don't know exactly what's going to happen. But what I do know and based on the current information in the current housing market is most buyers simply cannot afford the median price home today. And so that will remain true even if people would like to see home prices continue to go up. And if, say, they were to go up by some miracle, it's probably only going to go up more on the high end of things where people are already wealthy and can afford higher end properties, more on the luxury side of things. But at least in the near term, I don't see a situation where the median home can actually appreciate much more into the future because already the median home buyer cannot afford to buy them unless this pushes more people that have tons of money to invest in these assets because they're worried about the government deficit spending. And that is kind of the big wild card. If we start seeing a massive resurgence in real estate investment, for example, due to this new big beautiful bill, well, then that will change everything. And obviously it's way too soon to tell if we're actually going to see something like that happen. So we'll just have to keep an eye on investor activity moving forward. Another real estate related item to the big beautiful bill is the permanent extension of the mortgage interest deduction, which encourages homeownership by making mortgage interest deductible long term. However, they didn't really raise the cap on that. It is still capped out at I think $10,000 per year. And you know, they should have thrown something in there for renters too because that's something that I see as a big criticism is why do homeowners get to deduct $10,000 a year of their mortgage interest? Why don't tenants get to deduct $10,000 a year of their rent payments? And it's a legitimate question because obviously the government gives tax credits and tax breaks and incentives for things that they want you to do. That's how the government and the IRS works, right? So this is their way of saying we want you to buy a house and this is our way of making sure that home prices continue to go up in the long term because we're giving the incentive to the homeowner to do that. Although this doesn't make owning a home cheaper by any means. So don't think and don't be fooled that just because a homeowner gets to deduct up to $10,000 a year of their mortgage interest that somehow they're getting ahead of a renter who's paying half of the monthly payment that a homeowner is paying. Plus the homeowners stuck with all the costs associated with maintaining that house. So you're still in a much better position as a renter who is saving that money and paying half of the rent versus what a homeowner would have to pay. But still they should have thrown a bone in there for renters too. And one last thing that we didn't talk about yet is the impact on Social Security. So this new big beautiful bill also ensures that 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits because it gives people who receive Social Security an additional $4,000 per year on their standard deduction. And you know just giving my own objective opinion here out of all the things that we went over. I think it definitely does more disproportionately favor people that already have money when you look at you know the auto loan thing and getting into debt and borrowing things like that and doesn't really help as many people on the lower end of the income spectrum. But that doesn't mean that I'm in favor of high-income earners being taxed more. That doesn't mean that the rich should pay all the taxes and people who make less should have to pay nothing or less. That I don't agree with. I think the fairest approach to any sort of taxes would just be a situation where there was a flat tax like everybody paid the same amount. Everybody has to pay 20% of their income for example. So regardless of what you make you got to pay 20% of that in income taxes and that's it. You know to make it just as fair as possible for everybody. Instead of incentivizing people to use debt in nefarious ways and encourage people to take on more debt and it's just kind of one of the ugliest things about this country that is truly rotting America from the inside out and is ultimately probably going to be the thing that is going to cause the dollar to be kicked off the World Reserve currency as the standard for the world to use as money because clearly we've demonstrated that we cannot use this in a responsible manner and this latest bill is the perfect example of that. How's it going? People say that I don't criticize Trump as much as I do Biden. Well, I disagree guys because I think they're both bad in their own ways. Trump promised before he was elected that he was going to get in there and reduce spending and help lower the deficit of this country. Instead, what does he do? He's blowing up the deficit. He did it his first term and now he's doing it already right at the beginning of his second term right after he promised he wasn't going to do this and you know who's going to be all suffering and on the hook for all this extra debt? That's right you and me and generations to come. So that's a major disappointment and everybody who signed off on this should be ashamed of themselves to be honest just from the debt perspective alone. So let me know what you guys think about all this down in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video, make sure that you are subscribed to the channel and if you don't want to wait for my next video to come out check out this one on the screen right over here and I'll see you in the next one.