From a Google Image Search - PBS
There are people in America who can ignore the chaos of Trump.
· The lies counted by the media.
· The confusion in his pandemic policies (or whatever that was he was doing).
· Trump’s insistence that the President is protected in every way by executive privilege and is basically untouchable by law,
· That checks and balances do not apply to America’s CEO (king).
· His lust to foment an insurrection over a fantasy (that he won the 2020 election) to prove that he had taken over the hearts and weapons of Americans and turned citizens into his own personal army.
· His love affair with dictators and white supremacists.
· Trump’s new attempts to undermine fair and free elections in America.
· His unscrupulous use of campaign donations to pay personal debts.
· His misogyny.
· His hatred of mainstream media.
· His loyalty tests.
· His constant replacement of competent staff members with loyalists.
· His abuse of the Constitution when it created roadblocks to his demands (you wimps want to get rid of Roe v Wade, I’ll take care of that for you, and he stuffs the court with the help of McConnell and the Federalist Society)
· The list is long.
The people who can ignore all of this will usually say that Trump was great for the US economy and that is why they will reelect him. Pushing aside a belief that this is most likely not their real reason, it is worth thinking about how good Trump was for the economy.
America is caught up in a fiesta of greed. But it isn’t dressed up as greed. It is dressed up as success. Everywhere is the underlying message that you too can be a millionaire, a multimillionaire, even a billionaire if you have a positive mindset and a unique product or service to sell, and if you learn how to master the art of being successful.
Worldwide 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021 (out of 7.5 billion people on the planet). 2.5 million people became millionaires in America in 2021. The total number of millionaires globally increased to 62.5 million at the end of 2021.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90792355/global-wealth-report-2022-millionaires-usa
There are 240,575 multimillionaires in the US according to Wikipedia.
13.61 million households in America have a net worth of one million or more not counting their primary residence. That is 10% of US households.
The US is home to over a quarter of the world’s billionaires, representing about 720 of the roughly 2,200 that exist globally.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-wealthiest-billionaire-in-each-u-s-state-in-2022
Despite all our talk about success and what it takes to be successful, despite a billion-dollar book business offering hints to strivers, all our positive thinking and visualizations, there are not that many rich people in America, although we are the richest country on the face of the earth. In order to focus on wealth, it has been necessary to denigrate those who are not wealthy, to segregate those who are not strivers from the strivers as they might doom your climb to riches. They are the undeserving and are to be left in the dust if they cannot keep up. The numbers tell a different story. Not that many people make it to the top of the heap even given our current obsession with success and lots of wise advice from those who have made it.
Is this American lust for wealth something that can be laid at the feet of Donald Trump? Isn’t Donald Trump’s overly exaggerated wealth and success what convinced many Americans to elect him. He seemed to be enormously wealthy despite bankruptcies and failures. He was, by untrue rumor, a self-made man (financed by Daddy’s millions.) He didn’t invent the America quest for wealth, wealth above all other qualities that philosophers and gurus have deemed valuable, intangibles like honor, and wisdom, talent, and empathy, philanthropy, and raising up your entire society rather than just yourself (altruism, humanism).
Trump made an overweening ego seem like a virtue. It was charismatic. Donald Trump’s economy was the best economy America ever had, says Donald and his peeps echo it. Why do they say that? Is that true? It is about to saddle us with a Congress packed with Trumpers and with, perhaps, a second term when Trump, in his rage at being cheated and struck with the arrows of pending litigation, will be empowered to take out that rage on those he believes are his enemies. We will return to the untouchable Presidency, the loyalist replacing bureaucrats and intelligence workers and security forces, eventually turning the American Presidency into what is essentially a dictatorship. The Republicans only wanted to stomp the Democrats to death and then lead as a single party. They are enabling a person who wants to rule as a single person. Republicans will only be the cheerleader squad in this scenario.
Was Trump-economics really that good? Are we so focused on hoarding riches that we will give up our freedom. Freedom is not whether you must do some trivial thing for the benefit of the greater good, as in wearing a mask. We know what freedom really is because all around us are nations where you can be killed for speaking truth to power, for dissenting, for voting for the wrong side, or any reason an authoritarian leader wishes to espouse such as wearing your head scarf wrong if you are a woman, defying your submissive status.
Trump set tariffs that alienated many of our friends. He wanted to take us out of NATO and the UN, and the Paris Climate Change Accord and he almost accomplished all those goals. Why did he want to throw in our lot with Putin and Xi and Orbán? He is credited with passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but it was easy with Congress on his side. How has this helped anyone besides the 13.6 millionaires and multimillionaires and the 720 billionaires?
Biden, Schumer, Hochul, and my local government just signed a huge deal with Micron to build a chip factory 20 minutes from my home in central New York. Other businesses are talking about coming back to America. Perhaps the policies in China during COVID worried them, or Putin’s attack on Ukraine – the reasons for repatriating may not accrue to either President, but it is happening in the Biden administration.
Is Biden spending too much money? Sometimes you must invest in a nation’s infrastructure to generate progress. Sometimes you must invest in a society’s infrastructure – its workers, its consumers – to generate progress. Perhaps this is not a time to pinch pennies, to give free rein to our personal lust for wealth when we are ignoring existential climate changes on the planet and the wealthy deny they exist because it will cost them money to help fix it. Transitioning the entire energy structure of a planet may occasionally cause some bulges in inflation. It's unexplored territory. The last transition to industrialization happened organically. We are trying to engineer our current transition without causing world wars. Can it be done? Can Republicans who are climate deniers do this?
Why does the average worker care about deregulation of corporations when such policies set workers up for abuse by employers, things like surveillance of a workers every move, every keystroke? The only explanation is that these workers have caught the lust for success, and they believe they will someday belong to the millionaire class? They want to reap the benefits that will be waiting for them when they get there. Current data doesn’t make their chances at upward mobility look promising.
Trump’s wonderful economy is a myth. Since an unprecedented pandemic which caused world economies to shut down intervened between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, we are on uncharted territory here also as we are with our energy transitions, our fight to save our oceans, and our clean water. Will 19 th century economics do the trick? Will one man’s gut do the trick? We are in mucky territory here and could easily be sucked under. Wending a path between economic advisors and common sense may have to suffice.
Trump has so many negatives and only one fictional positive. We must vote wisely. Do not vote for a Congress full of Trump loyalists without any political or economic expertise in their brains. This is a terrible moment in time to elect people who have been brainwashed by a man with dictator’s disease. It doesn’t matter if you like Biden, because Biden doesn’t govern all by himself. He uses the advisors and the Congress to help him pass laws and make decisions, as our founders intended.
For the Nerds: Graphs showing lack of upward mobility
