Liberals are rightly despairing after the Senate last week passed a sweeping rewrite of the tax code. The rushed bill included some huge drafting errors, so a conference committee with the House will have to iron out the kinks, with final votes in each chamber providing a final opportunity for resistance. But House and Senate Republicans share the same agenda: Shovel handouts to aristocrats and owners of capital and large corporations, while punishing virtually everyone else. Chances are, they’ll be able to fill in the details and finish the job.

It’s worth worrying about the country’s future under a tax regime that will skyrocket inequality, poke holes in the health care system, and re-engineer the economy so it works even more disproportionately for the upper class. But this legislation also gives cause for hope. If and when Democrats ever regain power, the tax bill will become powerful tools for escaping a straitjacket that always constricts their big ideas for economic redistribution. But they have to muster the political will to do it, which they’ve been unable to do in recent history.

The tax bill represents two separate plans: the largest tax cut in American history and the largest tax increase. The $4.5 trillion increase over ten years partially covers the $6 trillion cut, 80 percent of which will flow to the top 1 percent. The main tax cuts include a 15-point drop in the corporate rate; a significant rollback (or repeal—the House and Senate bills differ) of the inheritance tax on dynastic wealth; deductions for dividends on foreign earnings and other vehicles used by the rich; and a reduced rate for so-called “pass-through” businesses that aren’t corporations, like law firms or hedge funds or neighborhood stores. Rich people, like the Trump family, disproportionately use pass-through entities. The incentives in the bill are enormous for those who can afford fancy accountants to create them, and take advantage of the lower rates.

These cuts alone cost close to $3 trillion; a handful of last-minute giveaways to corporations push that number upward. Even one of the “revenue raisers” in the bill, a $300 billion boost by letting corporations who have earnings stashed overseas to bring them back home at a significantly reduced tax rate, is really a cut given how much potential revenue is being forgiven. But these regressive moves, while objectionable, also create $3 trillion worth of a sacred object in Washington: the pay-for, which is a deficit-reducing measure to offset new spending or tax reductions, leaving no overall impact on the budget. There’s even a law, known as “paygo,” requiring any deficit-increasing legislation to be offset with pay-fors.

Every time a Democrat (and really only a Democrat) proposes some new idea—free college, a giant tax credit for children or the working poor, a large-scale infrastructure program, even a basic income for every American—both Republicans and the media join in unison with the refrain that the country is broke and we just can’t pay for these priorities. Well, Republicans just found the money for $3 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest entities in society. Rolling those back to Obama-era levels creates a $3 trillion kitty for liberal initiatives. If you want college for all or universal health care or retirement security for every American, Republicans just carved out a significant path to doing it while satisfying budget rules and quieting the deficit hawks.