A Government Of Billionaires, By Billionaires, And For Billionaires

The following is just part of a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America. 

As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires. 

Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen. 

Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions. 

America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic. 

Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.

 

But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power. 

The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.

 

The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans. 

This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act). 

Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.