The Massive U.S. Debt Is Making The Oligarchs Even Richer

The following is part of an excellent article by Thom Hartmann (at The Hartmann Report):

Prior to Reagan’s presidency, we’d been steadily paying down our 106-percent-of-GDP debt from World War II; by the time he came into office in 1981, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter (and their Congresses) had paid it down to a mere 31% of GDP.

And while we were paying down that debt, we also built the interstate highway system, put into place free college and cheap mortgages for millions with the GI Bill, created Medicare and Medicaid, built thousands of new schools and hundreds of new hospitals, and sent men to the moon.

We were able to do all that because during that entire New Deal era, right up until Reagan took office, the top marginal income tax rate on morbidly rich money hoarders ran between 70 and 91 percent.

One could get rich, but it was nearly impossible to become an oligarch like today. . . .

Reagan and Bush Sr. took our national debt from under $1 trillion and jacked it all the way up to $4.4 trillion in a mere 12 years. If you add up the impact of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, and add in the $8 trillion from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that GW Bush lied us into, it pretty much equals our entire ~$40 trillion national debt today.

And now Trump wants to give the Pentagon another $1.5 trillion next year, an explosion of “defense” spending that will re-stimulate the economy and add to our debt, crushing families as it spikes interest and inflation. Not to mention the billions he’s demanding from Congress right now to cover the costs of his and Bibi’s stupid war against Iran.

And here’s where the story gets wild with a point that probably 95 out of 100 Americans don’t realize: that trillion-plus dollars we pay every year for interest on our national debt doesn’t just vanish or fly into outer space; most of it goes straight into the pockets and money bins of the morbidly rich.

What a scam!

Forty-five years of Reaganomics have converted what were once the tax bills for the morbidly rich into a source of extremely safe revenue for them, since they’re among the largest holders of US Treasuries. And we’re paying the bill to shovel all that interest money into their money bins.

Money that flowed from the rich into the Treasury between the 1930s and 1980s as taxes now flows from the Treasury into the pockets of the extremely rich every quarter as interest payments, and it’s paid for by working people with their paychecks.

 

We spend more making interest payments to rich people every year than we do on Defense or Medicare, and almost as much as we spend every year on Social Security; interest on the national debt is the second largest line-item in the entire national budget. . . .

When Republicans loudly and self-righteously proclaim that America can’t afford Medicare for All or tuition-free college, we all need to be clear about what they’re really saying. They’re telling us that they’ve already spent that money, on themselves and their rich buddies, and stuck you and me with the debt and the interest payments.

We can step into that information void created by our captured media and flaccid Democratic messaging. Tell everybody you know how this has screwed most of us, while making Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their billionaire class richer than any pharaoh or king in world history. 

And demand that our candidates promise to raise taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations back up to reasonable levels while funding modern social programs like everybody else has.

After all, we paid down most of our national debt once before following the most expensive war in world history, and we did it while building the world’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class because we taxed great wealth at rates requiring the morbidly rich to contribute to society like the rest of us. It worked then and it will work now, if we can just squeeze the political and moral courage out of our elected representatives.

Trump Wants To Fatten His Bank Account By Selling Insider Trading Info

Trump has come up with a new scheme (probably illegal) to make himself richer. Robert Reich explains:

Starting August 1, Trump Media and Technology Group will launch a new data feed aimed at high-frequency trading firms whose profits are made by making trades a fraction of a second faster than everyone else. 

It will provide “licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.” In other words, the feed will let you know what Trump has said before anyone else knows, meaning it’s well worth the tab that Truth Social will charge to see Trump’s posts before the rest of the public sees them — up to $100,000 per month.

That’s a pittance relative to what could be made, because Trump’s words on Truth Social — about his war in Iran, about his latest tariffs, about the Fed — have caused the stock market to soar or drop. So, if you’re a trader on Wall Street, you’ll make millions if you know what he’s posting a fraction of a second before everyone else knows. Perhaps more to the point, if you’re behind on that news, “you’ll get crushed,” as one hedge-fund executive told the Financial Times. 

No wonder Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn is gloating that the feed will “become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.” Trump Media has been unprofitable until now. 

Trump, of course, is the company’s largest shareholder.

 

The scheme is Trump’s most brazen way to illegally profit off his presidency and enrich his Wall Street insider friends. 

I say illegally because the Constitution lists “bribery” as a reason to remove a president from office, and the federal ban on bribing public officials also expressly applies to a president. (Whether these provisions can be enforced against a president who’s been given blanket immunity from “official acts” by the Supreme Court is another matter.)

The good news, though, is Americans are catching on to insider trading, and they hate it — so much so that House Republican leaders are now teeing up a vote this week on a bill that would create new guardrails for lawmakers trading stocks.

 

The “Stop Insider Trading Act” would bar members of Congress and their families from purchasing new shares of stock and require them to file a notice of their plans to sell shares at least seven days ahead of time. 

Most Democrats say the measure doesn’t go far enough because it allows members to keep shares of stock they already own, in contrast with a competing bipartisan proposal that bars members from trading individual shares of stock altogether. And one provision Republicans have snuck into the measure —and that must be removed if they want any Democratic votes — deters mail-in voting. 

The point is that at the same time Trump is rolling out a new tool to give traders more immediate access to his market-moving posts on Truth Social — if they’ll pay him up to $100,000 a month for it — Congress is limiting how members can profit from inside information they obtain through elected office. 

The American public is so disgusted by corruption in Washington that even Republican lawmakers want something to show they’re not in the swamp. 

Trump doesn’t give a damn about the public’s mounting revulsion at corruption. He’s not up for reelection. He doesn’t care that his polls are in the cellar. All he wants to do is make even more money, exert more power, and get even with people who have gotten in his way. 

But the public wants his swamp drained. 

Democrats, take note. Three months from now, ask Americans two related questions: Do they think they’re better off than they were before Trump became president again? Do they approve of the most corrupt White House in American history?

 

The answer to both will be a resounding no. And the best way for Americans to act on their disgust will be to kick the Republican bums out.

The 45-Year GOP Scam Has Made The Rich Much Richer And Everyone Else Poorer

The following post is by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

Republicans yesterday proposed an appropriations bill that will allocate a billion dollars to pay for Trump’s Golden Epstein Dance Hall (aka “Ballroom”). Every penny of it will be borrowed and we’ll be paying interest on that money for the rest of our lifetimes unless something dramatic changes.

This year, America will spend over a trillion dollars just to pay interest on the current $39 trillion national debt, a debt entirely the result of a 45-year-long GOP scam designed to make the rich richer and elect Republicans, all while simultaneously screwing Democrats and average working class people.

It’s the biggest scandal of the century and is almost never mentioned by the press, even when they noted last week that — for the first time since World War II — our debt is now larger than our entire economy. And by 2030, Fortune magazine reports, we’ll be paying $2 trillion in interest at the current rate of burn, as Republicans add more and more items to the national debt every day.

To put that in context, here’s the “lost opportunity cost” of what that trillion dollars a year we now pay in interest — roughly $3000 every year for every man, woman, and child in the country — on the GOP’s Debt could do for America:

— First, it could guarantee universal childcare and early childhood education nationwide that would free millions of parents to work or start businesses and would pay long-term dividends in better educational outcomes.

— Second, it could make all public colleges, universities, and trade schools tuition-free, while also wiping out existing federal student loan debt over time.

— Third, the U.S. could establish a universal healthcare system or at least a robust public option with zero premiums and minimal out-of-pocket costs, ending medical bankruptcies and improving public health outcomes.

— Fourth, it could fully fund a national infrastructure modernization program,repairing every deficient bridge in the country, rebuild highways, expand mass transit, and replace aging water systems, including lead pipe removal nationwide.

— Fifth, a trillion dollars a year could finance a rapid transition to clean energy: building out solar and wind at scale, modernizing the grid, subsidizing home electrification, and accelerating EV infrastructure to catch up with China.

— Sixth, it could end homelessness in America, with massive savings in healthcare and policing.

— Seventh, we could provide a guaranteed basic income (~$500 to $1,000 a month) to every adult American, or a more targeted version for lower- and middle-income households, dramatically reducing poverty.

— Eighth, it could expand Social Security and Medicare benefits significantly — raising monthly checks, lowering the retirement age, or both — while shoring up the system’s long-term solvency.

— Ninth, the U.S. could also fund universal paid family and medical leave, so no one ever again has to go to work sick or choose between a paycheck and caring for a newborn or a sick relative.

— Tenth, it could dramatically increase teacher pay, reducing class sizes, modernizing school facilities, and providing universal free school meals.

— Eleventh, it could launch a large-scale affordable housing initiative, building millions of units, stabilizing rents, and helping first-time homebuyers with down payments.

— Twelfth, it could rebuild and expand public health infrastructure, including pandemic preparedness, local health departments, research funding, and domestic manufacturing of critical medicines and supplies.

And even after doing several of those at once, there’d still be room for things like universal broadband, modernizing the postal system, expanding national parks and conservation efforts, and funding scientific research at levels that could accelerate breakthroughs in everything from cancer to renewables to clean water.

None of these things are happening, though, because Republicans insist “we can’t afford them because of the national debt” that they, themselves created.

It all started in the 1970s when Republican strategist Jude Wanniski noted that Republicans were viewed as Grinches while Democrats — who’d brought the people the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, and dozens of other popular programs — were viewed as Santas.

His solution was twofold: have Republicans become the “tax-cut Santas” while forcing Democrats to “shoot their own Santa” in the face by cutting back on those gift-like programs. 

The strategy was elegantly simple, and was adopted by the GOP in the first year of the Reagan presidency and is still in full operation. (There’s a more complete explanation and timeline here.) It has two parts:

1. When a Republican is in the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor, running up the debt as hard and fast as possible. All this deficit spending on the national credit card also produces “good times” by stimulating the economy like crazy, making Americans think Republicans are good with economics when in fact they’re only good at spending borrowed money.

2. When a Democrat is in the White House, start screaming about the debt and how “our children will have to pay for this!!!” to force that president and the Democrats in Congress to “shoot” their own social programs by cutting them back, producing hard times and reducing the deficits.

To justify all this deficit spending, Wanniski invented a term, “supply-side economics,” arguing that tax cuts for the morbidly rich would pay for themselves as wealth “trickled down” to average working people, and Art Laffer handily supplied a “curve” that seemed technical and scientific. The media lapped it up.

It was all, of course, bullshit, but the American press bought it and no Republican has been seriously challenged on it in 45 years. 

The combined Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with Bush’s two wars add up to more than our current national debt of ~$39 trillion. And the only way to fix all this without causing horrible pain for the American people is to undo those three presidents’ tax cuts and take America back to the tax system we had in 1980.

When Democrats take over and end the current GOP fascist experiment, they’ll have a huge job to do, unwinding all of this debt. Fully a third of all the debt in American history has come from one president — Trump — who once bragged:

“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me.”

Trump’s billion-dollar Golden Epstein Dance Hall is just the latest gilded insult borrowed against our children’s future, while the trillion dollars a year we now pay in interest on the GOP’s 45-year “Two Santas” tax-cut scam could be ending homelessness, guaranteeing healthcare, rebuilding our schools, and lifting millions out of poverty. 

It’s beyond time to roll back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for the morbidly rich. As Graham Platner says, “We have to use the tax code to take back the money they’ve stolen from us.”

It’ll be a big job and the billionaires and big business will squeal like stuck pigs, but our debt — and the interest payments on it — have finally reached the point where the GOP’s Two Santas strategy risks crashing the nation’s entire economy. 

Democrats need to start talking about this now and point out clearly how we got here with Wanniski‘s Two Santas strategy!