Trump's Insane Idea To Help The Rich And Hurt Everyone Else

 

If Trump is re-elected, he and his GOP cohorts have already told us they want to continue the tax cuts he got passed during his first term (over 80% of which went to the rich and super-rich). It won't help the working class at all, and will only have a tiny benefit for the middle class -- and it will add trillions more to the national debt. It's a very bad idea.

Now Trump has come up with an even worse idea. At his meeting with congressional Republicans, Trump floated the idea of doing away with the income tax completely and replacing it with a tariff on all goods entering the United States.

Before you celebrate the idea of no income tax, stop and think of what the tariff on everything would mean. It would mean higher prices of nearly everything you buy. And not just a little higher. To replace the billions received in income taxes, the tariffs would have to be very high - and that would make prices on goods much, much higher!

It would be disastrous for the poor. They are already struggling to get by, and raising prices much higher would mean they would struggle just to have a subsistence existence. Working class families would also be devastated. They are already barely keeping up with inflation. The higher tariffs would mean they'd fall behind, and many would drop into the poor class. Middle class workers would also suffer. All of these groups would pay much more in higher prices than they currently pay in income taxes.

Only one group would be helped. The rich would make out like bandits! They would be happy to pay the higher prices, because it would be much less that they have to pay in taxes - and they could easily afford the higher prices.

It's just one more crazy idea that shows Trump, and his GOP cohorts, only care about one small group - the rich (and especially the super-rich). They don't care about hurting ordinary Americans as long as they can serve the rich.

Republicans Don't Care About The Suffering Of The Poor

The United States is still the richest country on the planet. And yet, there is a higher percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty than in most other developed nations. At least 11.5% of U.S. citizens live on poverty. That's over 37 million people.

Why is this true? It is because one of our political parties (Republicans) has pursued (and continues to pursue) economic policies that favor the rich, does nothing for the working and middle classes, and actually punishes the poor. 

The U.S. government does offer some assistance to the poor, but Republicans have made sure that assistance is minimal and most are required to work to receive it. They tend to believe the poor are just lazy and must be forced to work. They are wrong. 

Government assistance is onerous and embarrassing, and most poor people would rather work than receive the assistance. But that work needs to offer them a way out of poverty - not just insure they remain poor.

There are two simple ways to drastically reduce the number of poor people in the United States.

The first is to raise the minimum wage to a livable wage. The current minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour. That is about $15,080 a year. The poverty level designated by the government is shown in the chart below.

The current minimum wage is only $20 a year above the poverty line for a single person. It is far below it for a family of two or more. And many households only have one wage earner (like a single parent with children). 

Raising the minimum wage to a livable wage (at least $15 an hour) would instantly lift many families out of poverty.

But one more thing also needs to be done. The government needs to help working class and poor families with childcare. It doesn't help to make more if most of it goes to pay for childcare. President Biden tried to get childcare included in the laws he got passed earlier (assuring no family would pay more that 7% of income for childcare), but it was killed by the GOP.

A higher minimum wage, coupled with help to pay for childcare, would lift millions out of poverty. And would save millions in government assistance. That saving could be used to raise assistance for those who cannot work, and would help to reduce the federal deficit.

This makes imminent sense, but the Republicans will have none of it. They still think the right economic policy is to help the rich and corporations save on taxes. They seem to have no interest in helping the poor, the working class, and only give minimal assistance to the middle class. They say helping the rich to have more helps everyone. That has never been true.

This nation is rich enough to eliminate most (or all) poverty in its borders. But it will never happen as long as the Republicans have the power to dictate economic policy.

Do You Really Want To Hurt Yourself By Voting Republican?

 

The Republicans like to talk about cutting taxes. But they don't mean your taxes or mine. They want to cut taxes further for the rich and super-rich. Just look at the last tax cut they did. About 82% of it went to the rich, while only 18% went to other Americans (and even that pitiful amount was set to disappear after a few years).

So, I can understand why a rich person (who cared only about himself or herself) would vote Republican. But I continue to be amazed that any of the poor or the working and middle classes would vote that way.

Just look at what they want to do:

They want to cut help for the poor and disadvantaged, even though these people are struggling just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. They tell you that America can't afford to help these people. They don't tell you the truth though. If all help for the poor was eliminated, it wouldn't equal the tax cut the rich got in the Trump administration.

This country has a higher percentage of poor people than any other developed nation (including a higher percentage of poor children). The cuts they want to enact would only increase these percentages. The U.S. is still the richest nation of Earth. Why can't it provide adequate support for the poor?

The Republicans also want to keep the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour -- a poverty wage. And some would like to eliminate the minimum wage altogether, and let businesses pay even less. Anyone willing to work hard for 40 hours a wee should not be forced to live in poverty. But Republicans don't care about working people. And they know that raising the minimum wage would put upward pressure on all wages (including those of the middle class).

Republicans want to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age to 70. That might be fine for bankers that sit on the butts all day, but the millions of people who actually do hard physical labor for a living would be hurt. Most of them are lucky to get to the current retirement age of 66 before their bodies wear out. Republicans also want to change the way seniors get a cost-of-living adjustment to their social security checks, making it impossible for them to keep up with inflation.

Another way they are trying to keep wages low is to make it harder to join a labor union, or for those unions to strike or negotiate for decent wages and safe working conditions. Strong labor unions built the middle class in this country. The continual GOP effort to hurt unions is squeezing the middle class out of existence.

Inflation, even though it is coming down, is hurting most Americans. The Republicans say they would control inflation. But the only plan they have is to give the rich more while taking more from everyone else. That will not bring inflation down. It will just make our economy more unfair to most Americans.

Unless you are rich, voting Republican will not help you. It will just make things worse.

The Economy Has Improved - And Become More Unfair

The U.S. economy has improved under President Biden. But most Americans are feeling it, because the rich have sucked up most of the improvement, leaving the rest of Americans to struggle. Robert Reich  (pictured) explains:

We learned last Thursday that the U.S. economy grew at an annualized 2 percent rate in the first quarter of this year. That’s well above economists’ expectations of around 1.4 percent. 

But if you didn’t get this news, you’re not alone. Good economic news doesn’t make it through the negative sludge of Fox News or Newsmax. It almost doesn’t get through the mainstream media, either.

 

There’s more good news on the economy. In the four years of Donald Trump’s administration, total spending on manufacturing facilities grew by 5 percent. During the first two years of Biden’s administration, manufacturing investment more than doubled. And about 800,000 manufacturing jobs were created.

These remarkable results are the outcome of Biden policies — the Inflation Reduction Act and its green technology provisions, the infrastructure bill, and the CHIPS Act.

What about inflation? Biden’s stimulative spending did boost inflation. But the news that’s not getting through to most Americans is that inflation is dropping. It has declined significantly from its mid-2022 highs above 9 percent. Consumer prices are now rising by about 4.9 percent annually — still a problem, but not nearly the problem it was. Inflation in the United States is now well under the levels in European nations that made no comparable efforts to stimulate their own economies.

I continue to believe that much of the remaining inflation is due to the outsized profit margins that many major businesses have seized for themselves. Even the IMF recently found this. I wish Biden would make an issue of those profit margins. They’re enriching those at the top while imposing a big penalty on everyone else. 

And wages? For a while, real (adjusted for inflation) wages really were falling, and many economists were worried about rapidly rising unit labor costs. But now that inflation is subsiding, unit labor costs are moving in the opposite direction, and real wages are picking up again. 

So why do so many Americans continue to think the economy is awful? According to the Gallup economic confidence index, Americans haven’t felt this bad about the economy since the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. In an NBC News survey conducted a few weeks ago, at least 74 percent of Americans said the country is on the wrong track. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index is also pessimistic. 

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Joe Biden’s approval numbers have been stuck at around 43 percent. 

That’s bad news for an incumbent president running for reelection. History shows that presidents tend to lose reelection bids when about 70 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. They tend to win when fewer than half of Americans think that.

So the obvious question is, why are Americans are feeling so bad about an economy that’s relatively good?

One reason, I think, is a general sense of dread — centering on Trump, DeSantis, and Republican lawmakers in Congress — that seems to affect everything else. (I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have difficulty getting to sleep, worried about the rise of authoritarian fascism in America.) A recent study found that headlines have grown starkly more negative, conveying anger and fear. 

Then, too, there’s a kind of national pandemic-related PTSD from which many of us are still suffering. 

But I think the deeper reason Americans don’t feel very good about the economy is that is that the vast population of working non-college grads — some two-thirds of Americans — are still bogged down in dead-end jobs lacking any economic security, while struggling with many costs (such as housing, child care, and education) that continue to soar.

 

In other words, the economy is getting better overall — but overall has become a less and less useful gauge as the rich get richer, the poor grow poorer, and the working middle is under worsening siege.

Credit Card Perks Are Basically A Tax On The Poor

The following is just part of a New York Times article by Chenzi Xu and Jeffrey Reppucci: 

There’s an undeniable feeling of excitement when you turn your daily credit card swipes at Starbucks into first-class airfare or a weekend jaunt to Costa Rica. Thanks to mobile banking and the ease of autopay, you can scrupulously avoid any additional costs by paying your monthly bill in full. Free flights and exclusive discounts abound.

Something for nothing, right?

Not exactly nothing. Credit card perks for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less. In other words, when you book a hotel room or enjoy entry to an airport lounge at no cost, poor consumers are ultimately footing the bill.

Demand for rewards is only going up. In 2016, Chase launched its Sapphire Reserve card. The card comes with perks, bonuses and points multipliers that for big-spending travelers and diners are worth far more than its steep $550 annual fee. There was so much initial demand that Chase ran out of the metal slabs it prints the cards on. Sapphire’s enormous success set off a credit card perks war, with numerous banks flooding the market with sign-on bonuses worth thousands of dollars.

In 2022, the Federal Reserve published data showing that the cost of rewards, as a share of total transaction volume on credit cards, increased 25 percent from 2015 through 2021. This bonanza has helped affluent professionals flood Instagram with envy-inducing shots of white sand beaches, hotel suites and plush airport lounges.

But these high-income travelers are also less likely to carry balances that incur interest charges and late fees, which traditionally increase profits for card issuers. So, to offset the cost of paying lavish rewards to these consumers, banks have sought to maximize other usage-based revenues.

Enter interchange fees, or the money it costs merchants to accept noncash payments. A recent study at Stanford found that when credit card rewards increase, so do these fees.

The United States now has some of the highest credit card processing costs in the world, typically at 2 percent to 2.25 percent of every purchase. This is eight to nine times as much as the prevailing swipe fee in the European Union. The vast majority of merchants pass these costs on to consumers by charging more for their products — regardless of how one pays.

The result? Lower-income consumers are forced to pay higher prices on the goods they buy, but they rarely receive any benefit from rewards programs, according to the Federal Reserve, which has been tracking the distributional effects of card rewards. Its December 2022 report estimates an annual redistribution of $15 billion in rewards value from poorer people to richer people, from low-education people to highly educated people and from diverse communities to less diverse communities.

Put another way, credit card rewards are essentially a tax on less affluent consumers, who are much more likely to pay for their goods with cash, debit cards or standard credit products that accrue no such rewards.

Most Americans Would Not Be Helped By GOP Economics

Republicans are basing their election hopes on an economic message. They want Americans to believe they are the party that could best run the economy. That is nothing short of a lie! They cling to their failed "trickle-down" theory -- that whatever is good for the rich is good for everyone. That has not worked in the past, and would not work in the future. The truth is that the GOP economic plan would be bad for most Americans.

Republicans will not help the poor.

Republicans still want to cut government spending. And the spending they want to cut is the meager help the government gives to the poor. These people are already struggling to make ends meet, and the Republicans would make their lives much harder.

Republicans will not help the working poor.

Somewhere between 20% and 25% of all workers are making at or close to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. That is a poverty wage that keeps these workers poor, even though they work hard at a full-time job. No one who works a full-time job should have to live in poverty, but the Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage.

Republicans will not help seniors.

Republicans want to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare, even though they are funded by payroll deductions that workers pay their entire working lives. And Republicans have already said they will refuse to raise the debt limit (and cause the nation to default on its loans) to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare. These cuts will make life harder for seniors -- many of whom depend solely on those programs to stay out of poverty.

Republicans will not help the middle class.

Unions built the middle class in this country. But Republicans oppose unions. They want to make it harder to join a union or form a new union. They know that without unions their corporate masters can keep worker wages below what it should be. In the past, workers shared in productivity gains, but thanks to Republicans the rich corporate owners now hog all those productivity gains. And Republicans will allow that to continue.

Those groups together make up a majority of Americans. To be blunt, the Republicans have no interest in helping a majority of Americans.

So, who would they help. That's easy -- the rich and corporations. They have already come out in favor of making the Trump tax cuts permanent -- tax cuts that went mostly to the rich and corporations.

Don't let the GOP politicians fool you. They are not the party of the poor, the working class, or the middle class. They are the party of the rich. The only thing they offer those who are not rich is just lies!

Republicans Deny Affordable Insulin To Millions

These two paragraphs are from The Washington Post.

Millions of Americans have Type I Diabetes. For them, insulin is a life-saving drug. But the greedy drug companies have raised the price of insulin many times over the years -- and that price is so high that many cannot afford the needed drug.

Some are trying to ration the bit of insulin they are able to buy -- taking less than the prescribed amount of skipping shots. They hope to make the drug go further. But this is putting their medical condition in jeopardy. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say some are dying by doing this.

But what choice do they have. The drug companies are not going to lower the price unless they are forced to do it. To them, profits are more important than the lives or health of American citizens. It's greed gone crazy, and it's dangerous.

Democrats in the Senate tried to fix this last weekend. They included a $35 cap on insulin in the Inflation Reduction Act. That would make insulin more affordable to all those who need it. Unfortunately, the Senate Republicans agree with Big Pharma that profits are more important than lives. Using an arcane Senate rule, they stripped the $35 cap on insulin out of the bill -- and then voted down a Democratic effort to put it back in the bill.

The cap remains for those on Medicare. But millions of Americans are not old enough to be on Medicare. They still need the insulin though, and they will still have to pay the outrageous price demanded by the drug companies -- if they can afford it. If they cannot afford it, they could die quickly, or die more slowly by trying to ration the amount they could afford.

Republicans have once again shown that they don't care about Americans -- unless they are rich white men.

Republicans Want To Raise Taxes On Everyone But The Rich

During the Trump administration, Republicans cut taxes for corporations and the rich. They would like to cut taxes even more, but not for most Americans. They think the poor, the working class, and the middle class don't pay enough in taxes. They only want to cut taxes for the richest Americans.

Here's how Steve Benen puts it at MSNBC.com:

Senate hopeful Mike Gibbons — by some measures, the frontrunnerin Ohio’s GOP primary — pledged yesterday that he will not support new taxes if elected. At face value, this didn’t seem especially notable, since Republicans make similar vows all the time.

But Gibbons probably felt the need to make such a declaration because of this Associated Press report.

Mike Gibbons, a leading Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, said at a media event last fall that middle-class Americans don’t pay “any kind of a fair share” of income taxes. “The top 20% of earners in the United States pay 82% of federal income tax — and, if you do the math, and 45% to 50% don’t pay any income tax, you can see the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share, depending on how you want to define it,” Gibbons said.

It’s important to emphasize that Gibbons, a millionaire investment banker, made the comments in September, just a few months after launching his second Senate bid. To date, the GOP candidate hasn’t given any indication of how (or whether) he’d try to get middle-class Americans to pay their “fair share” of income taxes.

But there’s an even larger context to this. As regular readers know, Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, recently unveiled a 31-page blueprint, outlining the far-right ideas he wants his party to pursue after this year’s midterm elections. One provision stood out: “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”

In other words, tens of millions of American adults currently don’t pay federal income taxes because they don’t make enough money to qualify. As we’ve explained before, Scott, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, has proposed changing that: He envisions a tax system in which those who don’t make enough money would have to pay more than they pay now.

The Daily Beast reported last week, “At least four GOP candidates in the most important battleground states this fall have either explicitly expressed support for Scott’s plan or have campaigned on the political views that form the foundation of his platform.”

And it’s against this backdrop that the public has learned that the top contender in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary also believes that middle-class Americans aren’t paying enough in income taxes.

What’s more, this line of thought has a lengthy GOP pedigree. As we discussed a couple of months ago, in 2011, ahead of her ill-fated presidential campaign, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann complained that millions of Americans don’t make enough money to qualify to pay income taxes. The far-right Minnesotan described this as ruinous for democracy “because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something.”

Around the same time, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, while launching his own presidential bid, called it an “injustice” so many Americans “don’t even pay any income tax.”

On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans thought along the same lines. In April 2012, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said it wasn’t “fair” to have the wealthy pay income taxes, while low-income Americans do not.

And then, of course, there was Mitt Romney, who spent part of his presidential candidacy insisting that it was “a real problem” that so many Americans didn’t have to pay federal income taxes. It was a “problem” the wealthy Republican intended to fix.

The principal problem with Gibbons’ recent rhetoric in Ohio is that he told the truth about his genuine beliefs about tax policy — which is entirely in line with what many Republicans genuinely believe about tax policy. The risk to the GOP is that the public might eventually notice.

Texas (& Others) Refusing To Give Approved Aid To Poor

The pandemic has been hard on everyone (except the rich who have just gotten richer), but the people hit the hardest have been the poor. Congress has approved additional aid for them, but some red states are refusing to give them that aid (choosing instead to spend that money for other things). It just shows once again that Republicans don't care about the poor -- only about the rich.

The following is part of an article at MSNBC.com by Jarvis DeBerry:

In the state of Texas, there are almost 4 million poor people, by one recent count, but apparently few are penniless enough to meet the Lone Star State’s qualifications for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. To qualify for TANF in Texas, a single caretaker with two children must have less than $1,000 in assets and bring in less than $188 per month. For a person working full time, $188 a month amounts to an hourly wage of $1.18. Such stinginess helps explain why, according to a report Wednesday from ProPublica, Texas ended its 2020 fiscal year with $281 million in federal TANF funds unspent.

Texas, one of four states that denied at least 90 percent of its 2020 TANF applicants, had the lowest approval rate in the nation, approving only 7 percent. That means successfully applying for such welfare funds in Texas is as rareas successfully applying for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Yale University.

This is former President Bill Clinton’s conservative-appeasing welfare reform in action: Individual states, which were given the power to set their own rules for distributing welfare dollars, denying the poor life-sustaining help by drawing up the rules in a way that excludes most people who need help.

To put that another way: There aren’t so few people getting welfare because the demand for aid is so low; there are so few getting it because the supply of aid is being withheld by states choosing not to dispense it. Or, as previous reporting from ProPublica and The Guardian has noted, because those states are choosing to dispense TANF on things other than on welfare: including child protective services, anti-abortion clinics, Christian summer camps and programs to help people addicted to gambling.

Texas isn’t alone in its parsimony. Across the country, the states ended fiscal year 2020 with $5.2 billion in unspent TANF money. The amount of welfare dollars the states have not spent has doubled over the last 10 years as the number of approved applications has fallen by half, ProPublica reports. Our states holding on to $5.2 billion in unspent welfare dollars would be an outrage at any time but is especially awful considering that the fiscal year ended in the middle of a pandemic that exacerbated the country’s already embarrassing and unforgivably high rates of poverty and child poverty.

According to the Census Bureau, “The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4%, up 1.0 percentage point from 2019. This is the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.”. . .

The main argument for welfare reform was that nothing is as bad as a poor family spending a lifetime getting aid from the government. Framing it that way miscasts poverty as a consequence of laziness. But in the same way that prosperity is more a function of advantage than of hard work, poverty is more a function of disadvantage than of laziness. And in a nation that cares so little about dismantling systemic disadvantage, there is something that’s exceedingly worse than a family languishing on welfare: a government granted money to help people who are poor deciding that it’s better to leave hundreds of millions of dollars unspent.

Huge Income/Wealth Gap Is Our Nation's Biggest Problem

 

Prior to the 1980's, the rich did very well, but so did other Americans. That's because the rising productivity was shared among all groups. The rich got their share, workers got their share through rising wages, and the poor benefitted through government programs.

But when the Republicans gained enough power around 1980, they changed economic policy to the benefit of the rich and the detriment of everyone else. Their economic theory (commonly called the "trickle-down theory) stated that by giving more to the rich, everyone would benefit.

That did not happen. The rich gobbled up most of the rising productiviy, giving them enormous profits, while workers wages were virtually stagnant, and the poor suffered through program cuts. This policy created a huge (and growing) gap in income and wealth between the rich and everyone else -- a gap larger than it's been in about a century. 

The last time the gap was this big, it resulted in the Great Depression. Unless we fix this by instituting a fairer economic policy, we will likely experience that same economic devastation.

Here is what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has to say about this growing problem on his own website:

Policymakers and the media are paying too much attention to how quickly the U.S. economy will emerge from the pandemic-induced recession, and not nearly enough to the nation’s deeper structural problem – the increasing imbalance of wealth that could enfeeble the economy for years. 

Seventy percent of the US economy depends on consumer spending. But wealthy people, who now own more of the economy than at any time since the 1920s, spend only a small percentage of their incomes. Lower-income people, who were in trouble even before the pandemic, spend whatever they have – which has become very little.  

In a very practical sense, the U.S. economy depends on the spending of most Americans who don’t have much to spend. That spells trouble ahead. 

It’s not simply a matter of an adequate “stimulus.” The $2,000 checks contained in the American Rescue Plan have already been distributed and extra unemployment benefits will soon expire. Consumer spending will be propped up as employers add to their payrolls. Biden’s spending plans, if enacted, will also help keep consumers afloat for a time. 

But the underlying imbalance will remain. Most peoples’ wages will still be too low and too much of the economy’s gains will continue to accumulate at the top, for total consumer demand to be adequate.  

Years ago, Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, explained that the Great Depression occurred because the buying power of Americans fell far short of what the economy could produce. He blamed the increasing concentration of wealth at the top. In his words:

“A giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.” 

The wealthy of the 1920s didn’t know what to do with all their money, while most Americans could maintain their standard of living only by going into debt. When that debt bubble burst, the economy sunk. 

History is repeating itself. The typical Americans’ wages have hardly increased for decades, adjusted for inflation. Most economic gains have gone to the top, just as Eccles’s “giant suction pump” drew an increasing portion of the nation’s wealth into a few hands before the Great Depression. 

The result has been consumer spending financed by borrowing, creating chronic fragility. After the housing and financial bubbles burst in 2008, we avoided another Great Depression only because the government pumped enough money into the system to maintain demand, and the Fed kept interest rates near zero. Then came the pandemic. 

The wealth imbalance is now more extreme than it’s been in over a century. There’s so much wealth at the top that the prices of luxury items of all kinds are soaring; so-called “non-fungible tokens,” ranging from art and music to tacos and toilet paper, are selling like 17th-century exotic Dutch tulips; cryptocurrencies have taken off; and stock market values have continued to rise even through the pandemic.  

Corporations don’t know what to do with all their cash. Trillions of dollars are sitting idle on their balance sheets. The biggest firms have been feasting off the Fed’s corporate welfare, as the central bank obligingly holds corporate bonds that the firms issued before the recession in order finance stock buybacks.

But most people have few if any assets. Even by 2018, when the economy appeared strong, 40% of Americans had negative net incomes and were borrowing money to pay for basic household needs.

The heart of the imbalance is America’s wealthy and the corporations they own have huge bargaining power – both market power in the form of monopolies, and political power in the form of lobbyists and campaign contributions. 

Most workers have little or no bargaining power – neither inside their firms because of the near-disappearance of labor unions, nor in politics because political parties have devolved from giant membership organizations to fundraising machines.

Biden’s “stimulus” programs are fine but temporary. The most important economic reform would be to correct this structural imbalance by reducing monopoly power, strengthening unions, and getting big money out of politics. 

Until the structural imbalance is remedied, the American economy will remain perilously fragile. It will also be vulnerable to the next demagogue wielding anger and resentment as substitutes for real reform.

Wealth / Income Inequality Continues To Grow In The U.S.

These charts are from the Pew Research Center. They show an economic problem in the United States. The rich have kept getting richer, and at a much faster pace than the rest of the population -- creating a vast and growing gap in both income and wealth. 

We must fix this problem or we'll become a nation of "haves" and "have-nots". We are already more unequal than most other nations. 

This has been caused by the GOP's trickle-down economic policy. A failed policy in which nothing trickled down (but just went to fatten the bank accounts of the rich).

We must change that economic policy to one where rising productivity is shared among all groups. Fair economics is smart economics, and contributes to a better country for everyone.

It Time To Address The Growing Economic Inequality In U.S.

 The chart above is from Time magazine. It shows the growing inequality in wealth and income in the United States. In 1975, the top 1% had 9% of the country's income, while the bottom 90% had 67% of income. But then the GOP instituted their "trickle-down" economic policies which favored the rich.

Now the top 1% has 22% of the nation's income, while the bottom 90% has only 50% -- and the shift in income continues to grow because the GOP policies remain in place. This shift in income since 1975 amounts to over $50 trillion dollars! That means the rich have taken $50 trillion since 1975 that should have gone to the bottom 90%!

This must change, and that change needs to happen now! If it doesn't, we will quickly become a nation of "haves" and "have-nots" with a disappearing middle class.

We should start by raising the minimum wage, making it easier for workers to organize, and taxing the rich (and corporations) more.

The right-wingers will whine that this is "income redistribution". But the ignore that the $50 trillion was also income redistribution -- from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Income is always be redistributed in a capitalist economy. It is time that the redistribution be reversed, so all citizens can share in the nation's wealth and income -- not just the rich.

Pandemic Slides A Half-Billion People Into Poverty Worldwide (But Billionaires Are Doing Very Well)

(This image of rich and poor is by Rogelio Naranjo, and was found at Phawker.com.)

It would be a huge understatement to say the  billionaires are doing well. Between 1990 and 2020, the wealth of U.S. billionaires climbed by 1130%.

And they have not been hurt by the pandemic. Between March 18th and April 10th (as over 22 million workers lost their jobs), the wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by 10%.

But the same cannot be said of the middle and working classes. They are struggling just to maintain their economic state, and many are sliding into poverty because of lost jobs. And this is a worldwide phenomenon.

The pandemic may not be affecting the rich, but it is causing as many as a half-billion people to slide into poverty worldwide.

Consider this small part of an article in The New York Times by Maria Abi-Habib:

The World Bank says that for the first time since 1998, global poverty rates will rise. By the end of the year, 8 percent of the world’s population — half a billion people — could be pushed into destitution, largely because of the wave of unemployment brought by virus lockdowns, the United Nations estimates. . . .

While everyone will suffer, the developing world will be hardest hit. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will see its first recession in 25 years, with nearly half of all jobs lost across the continent. South Asia will likely experience its worst economic performance in 40 years.

Most at risk are people working in the informal sector, which employs two billion people who have no access to benefits like unemployment assistance or health care. . . .

The financial shock waves could linger even after the virus is gone, experts warn. Countries like Bangladesh, which spent heavily on programs to improve education and provide health care, which help lift families out of destitution, may now be too cash-strapped to fund them. . . .

The gains now at risk are a stark reminder of global inequality and how much more there is to be done. In 1990, 36 percent of the world’s population, or 1.9 billion people, lived on less than $1.90 a day. By 2016, that number had dropped to 734 million people, or 10 percent of the world’s population, largely because of progress in South Asia and China. . . .

But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession.

The Economy Is Not So Great For Many Americans

Donald Trump likes to brag about what a great economy the U.S. has. He tells us that it is the best economy this country has ever had, and it's due to his actions since assuming office. But he's either living in a dream world, or just lying to make himself look better.

The truth is that the economy is great for some Americans -- the rich. But it's not so great for the middle class, and it's downright terrible for the poor. The GDP is rising (although not nearly as much as Trump promised) and the unemployment rate is low. But most of the benefits of the growing economy is going to the rich. Wages for middle class Americans remain stagnant, and the poor struggle to make ends meet (because too many of the jobs being created are low-wage jobs with few benefits, and don't pay a livable wage).

The survey in the charts below illustrate this sad fact -- that too many Americans are not sharing in the wealth of this country, in spite of being hard-workers. It is the Pew Research Center Survey -- done between September 16th and 29th of a national sample of 6,878 adults, with a 1.6 point margin of error.