#trump wealth inequality

[alwaysbewoke]

[thashining]

Education

[izooks]

Wow.

This video is truly eye-opening.

Take a couple minutes to watch this.

A mind-boggling visual representation of wealth inequality in America.

This sh*t ain’t workin’, folks.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ This is why people think things are getting worse. 1% of the US population owns 31.4% of the nation's wealth.

This is the result of massive tax breaks for the filthy rich which began under Republican Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, were boosted twice by Republican George W. Bush in the 2000s, and got a big boost under Republican billionaire Donald Trump.

David Leonhardt at the New York Times writes...

The simplest explanation for the shift is that the old economic approach hasn’t worked very well for most Americans. Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. moved toward an economic policy that’s variously described as laissez-faire, neoliberal or market-friendly. It involved much lower taxes for the wealthy, less regulation of business, an expansion of global trade, a crackdown on labor unions and an acceptance of very large corporations. The people selling this policy — like Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics — promised that it would bring prosperity for all. It has not. Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of workers, as ranked by their earnings, have trailed economic growth, and wealth inequality has soared. For years, Americans have told pollsters that they were unhappy with the country’s direction. Perhaps most starkly, the U.S. now has the lowest life expectancy of any affluent country; in 1980, American life expectancy was typical. Conventional wisdom rarely changes quickly. Friedman and his fellow laissez-faire intellectuals spent decades on the fringes, before the 1970s oil crisis and other economic problems caused many Americans to embrace their approach. But conventional wisdom can change eventually. And after decades of unmet promises about the benefits of a neoliberal economy, more people have grown skeptical of it recently.

Massive tax breaks for the filthy rich as a means of boosting economic growth for all was once regarded as fringe economics – until Ronald Reagan took office. Even the man who became Reagan's vice president referred to such a policy in the 1980 primaries as "voodoo economics" – but to no avail. It has largely overshadowed economic policy for the past 40+ years.

There were only two exceptions. In 1993 when Democrat Bill Clinton raised taxes on the filthy rich. The economy soared and the 1990s became the most prosperous decade since the 1950s. And in 2013 Democrat Barack Obama let the Bush tax breaks expire. Sadly, Trump and the then GOP majorities on Capitol brought back the Bush tax breaks in 2017 and have been ironically blaming poor people for the subsequent rise in the national debt.

As president, Trump often contradicted his own populist rhetoric. (His one big piece of legislation was a tax cut that mostly benefited the rich.)

There needs to be a repeal of the Reagan-Bush-Trump tax giveaways to billionaires like Elon Musk.

One stat which Republicans don't like hearing is that in the mid 1950s, the highest federal income tax rate was 91%.

Republicans are nostalgic about some stuff about the 1950s like Jim Crow laws and suppression of women and gays. But they don't talk about the federal tax rate on the filthy rich which helped build the Interstate Highway System and provided low cost college education to the masses.

We don't need to go back to a rate of 91% for the Musks, Trumps, and Zuckerbergs. But just under half that rate would dramatically restore economic balance in this country. And the ONLY way to get there is to keep promoting growing Democratic majorities in Congress and electing Democratic presidents. Votes for third party losers are about as helpful as used toilet paper.

[top-secret-suicide]

Its time we squash the old idea that billionaires, and specifically giving tax breaks to billionaires, creates jobs.  That is just factually untrue.  Billionaires do NOT create jobs, the middle class creates jobs. 

If billionaires actually created jobs, then the economy and jobs would be at its all time best currently... when we have more billionaires than ever and most are paying less than 15% in taxes.  And conversely, during the 50s and 60s when there were less billionaires and they paid over 70% in taxes we would have terrible job numbers and a terrible economy... yet the complete opposite is what happened. 

The 50s and 60s is widely considered by economists as the best time in Amercia from an economics standpoint.  The dollar went the furthest, we had what was considered a roaring middle class, more people had more purchasing power, it was normal for 1 income to support a family.  Today, 2 people making $15/hr can't afford to live in major metropolitan areas.

Wealth inequality is at an astronomically high rate and we are dangerously close to truly living in an oligarchy, if we're not already.  So many of our issues we face today come back to how bad wealth inequality is currently.  We have a clear solution to this, one that has been proven to work in our own country - tax the rich.  Yet we have ppl barely making ends meet who will choose to stay in that situation and defend billionaires for no logical reason.  This isn't a Democrat or republican issue, we have a common enemy, the 1% and corporations are ruining the middle class.

[seileach67]

What's that line they're always throwing at us? Oh yes, "if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

That's exactly what we want.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

Why Trump Won | Robert Reich

[stephen-barry]

As outlined in Project 2025, under a second Trump administration, our federal government will deport immigrants in dragnet raids, target his political adversaries, spy on private citizens, promote discrimination against marginalized communities, and control what we can and can’t do with our bodies.

This dystopian view of American life threatens our fundamental freedoms.

We know from prior experience that our fear is real...

[filosofablogger]

A Second Gilded Age? Only For The 1%

What happens when wealth and power are at the top of a government?  The 99% become pawns in a game they cannot win.  Today, we stand at the brink of just that … and while numerous people are unwittingly contributing to making that happen, two people are working to turn the Disunited States into a plutocracy that will benefit only the richest and most powerful.  Robert Reich has some history and…

[thetruth2024]

Trump’s Tax Scam Revealed! Why Nothing Trickled Down.

[futurefatum]

How Elites Will Collapse America Like Rome (Tone: 100)

September 3rd, 2024 by @TomBilyeu How Elites Will Collapse America Like Rome: BlackRock, Trump vs Kamala & Market Crash | Whitney Webb ABOUT THIS VIDEO: This video discusses the potential collapse of the United States, drawing parallels to the fall of the Roman Empire. Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist, explores the role of influential entities like BlackRock in shaping U.S. fiscal…

[thashining]

Maga are you rich? Cause You vote like you are.

[itsblosseybitch]

The GOP appeals to the white working class not through class issues, but through racism. Because the white working class in the United States is, by and large, racist.

There's definitely a Horseshoe Effect when it comes to the racial politics between wealthy white Republicans and white working class Republicans. It's arguably their biggest common ground.

It's not that the white working class doesn't care about being underpaid and exploited for their labor. It's not that they're unaware of how much bosses and the capitalist system screw them over. On the contrary, they're quite cognizant of those issues. It's just that they are much more fearful of competing with immigrants over jobs or minorities fighting for racial equality, and they vote accordingly.

Some anecdotal evidence on my part: I'm a white woman born and raised in the South where my mom, dad, and stepdad's sides are all economically diverse but solidly Republican. I've heard pretty much every racist talking point across this large class gamut that doesn't include overt, KKK racism. A very close family member, a woman who grew up working class (and became middle class by marriage), cited the aforementioned fear of immigrants and minorities on why she voted for Trump, more than any other issue. The white working class kids I went to school with were also solidly Republican, and you bet your ass they had racist views!

There's a popular narrative that the white working class started voting Republican because the Democratic Party abandoned class issues. That narrative implies that the Republican Party has made class issues a large part of their platform, but that couldn't be further from the truth, as their embrace of Trickle Down Economics proves. Instead, the Democratic Party started emphasizing racial equality, which turned off the white working class by and large.

There's another popular but just as inaccurate narrative that the white working class are voting against their interests. From a class perspective, that's true. But once again, the white working class greatly prioritizes their racial politics over their class politics, so in reality, they actually are voting for their interests. Maintaining white supremacy - whether they want to admit it or not - interests them more than addressing wealth inequality.

As long as all of these factors hold true, the Republican Party will continue to court the white working class vote with Race Panic ad infinitum.

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[thelostdreamsthings]

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."

🇺🇸JEFFREY SACHS says ⬇️

"Who elected Trump? Billionaires.

Who was opposing Trump with Harris? Billionaires.

When you look at our politics—'We the People'—we are like spectators at a sport.

Who are the billionaires? Well, it's that list on one side and that list on the other.

We sit back—who's going to win? I don't know, but it's going to be the billionaires.

So what do the billionaires backing Trump want? Tax cuts.

What did the billionaires backing Harris want? Tax cuts.

What is the election going to produce? Tax cuts.

Big surprise. Is it a drama? Of course it's not a drama.

Our Congress is corrupt. Our political system is corrupt. It's run by the big boys, not by the little people, so we're going to have more tax cuts.

Here comes Trump, elected by a disgruntled voting population—the working class. This is his core.

And he's telling the working class, 'You've been cheated. I'm going to support you.'

And what's he going to do? He's going to give tax cuts to the richest people in the world.

You know, ten people now—TEN PEOPLE—have a net worth of $2 trillion.

I'm sorry, we can't even imagine what this means.

The days after Trump was elected, their net worth increased by $100 billion—in days.

Because people who have money know, 'Oh, this is a bonanza for the billionaires.'

By the way, if Harris had won, it probably would have gone up the same way—because it's billionaires on both sides.

So this deficit is going to rise; it's not going to fall.

Now Trump has a very particular, clever electoral strategy.

He says to the voters, 'The billionaires are your friends. That's not the problem. Your enemy is the immigrant and your enemy is China. I'm going to go after your enemies, not your friends, the billionaires.'

So what Trump says is, 'I'm going to raise tariffs on the Chinese, I'm going to kick out the immigrants, and you're going to live the American dream.'

And it's not going to happen.

And sure enough, within the next few years, the Trump administration will be a failure—widening income inequalities, big unhappiness, larger budget deficits, frictions with China, a lot of lawsuits in the United States, and people trying to stay in the U.S. who are threatened with deportation.

It's not going to be a happy period.

And this, unfortunately, comes from the fact that when you have two parties—billionaires backing this one and billionaires backing that one—someone gets left out.

And that's the people."

How rich people fukkk over Americans

This is a concept that meets a lot of resistance in the US, where Americans are taught to worship money.

Thus, ordinary people - especially conservatives - admire rich people regardless of how the wealth is acquired.

And the rich people are good at diversion — they blame the government, China, immigrants etc.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.