Popular Economics Weekly
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Jesus was to have said to his disciples. This should be the proverb that describes 2017, a year of lost souls.
What does it say about a country that elects a President who shows no sign of having a soul, but only wants profits for himself and his cronies?
Most Americans in 2017 have seen rock-bottom American values such as equality, justice, and tolerance assaulted to bring back a gilded age that profits a few. Instead of draining the DC swamp, President Trump has filled it with a record number of lobbyists; either writing the bills Republicans are pushing through congress, or installing lobbyists in the very government agencies they are tasked to regulate.
The 2017 nightmare began on the election of Donald Trump that will forever be tainted by Russia’s well-documented attempts to tilt the election to Trump and the Republican Party.
George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s inabilities in a Washington Post Op-ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”Psychologists and psychotherapists have said more; that Trump is mentally ill, or has an untreatable Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but either way, he lives in a fantastical world of his own making the almost completely ignores the reality that most Americans live.
The nightmare grew when we learned Russia may have been behind many of the dirty tricks, and anti-Hillary chants of “Lock Her Up” made by Trump campaign advisers such as General Flynn. We now know the FBI began its counter-intelligence operation of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, when it learned that the Russians had hacked both Republican and Democratic Party emails.
But Russia only weaponized the Democrats’ hacked emails via WikiLeaks, Facebook, and Twitter, not those of the Republicans. Therefore the suspicion has to be that Russia could blackmail one or more Trump campaign operatives into spying for them because Russia didn’t publicize the Republicans’ emails—maybe even President Trump and his family? That is precisely what the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation wants to determine.
The greatest nightmare of 2017 may be the record income inequity that was exemplified in the just-passed tax cuts that are to be paid for with up to $3 trillion in added federal debt plus spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years, which impoverish the poorest among US.
Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income equality. They found that the periods of greatest inequality were just before a major recession, such the as the Great Recession, and the Great Depression itself.
Both were the result of record income inequality. The greatest prosperity was post-WWII, when the modern American middle class was formed due to rapid economic growth and unionization of the workforce.
Graph: CPBB
When will the 2017 nightmare end? Maybe in 2018, if a majority of Americans realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is not theirs; but Americans see a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is available to all.
Harlan Green © 2018
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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