Financial FAQs
“Why? It’s not like we’re a small country or full of stupid people. No, it’s the takeover of the economists and bankers. Simply put, modern American law is oriented towards ensuring very high returns on capital to benefit Wall Street and hinder the ability to make things.” Matt Stoller, American Economic Liberties Project
Matt Stoller’s cry is a sign that even Libertarians are alarmed at Donald Trump and the Republicans’ scheme to grow the manufacturing sector. It’s another scam that enables them to turn the economic clock back to the 19th century, the Gilded Age of Robber Barons and rampant corruption and downsize government while ignoring modern laws and even the constitution.
Trump is doing it by raising tariff rates to a level not seen since 1930 at the onset of the Great Depression. But it won’t bring back a manufacturing industry that was lost to a globalized economy over the past 30 years.
The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte accounting firm have projected that manufacturing will need an additional 3.8 million workers by 2033, in part due to the Biden administration’s $2 trillion worth of projects already invested by the Infrastructure, CHIPs and Science, and Inflation Reduction Acts, according to a recent NPR report.
And the Trump administration’s goal of deporting millions of undocumented workers as well as eliminating DEI programs that develop more skilled minorities will defeat his purpose by hollowing out the required workforce.
Early 19th century was a time of few laws to protect working folk, and there was no income tax until 1913 when Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive era began to level the income playing field for workers. Oligarchs had to pay income taxes for the first time.
It was Ronald Reagan and the Business Roundtable of corporate CEOs that began the “takeover of the economists and bankers” that moved whole industries overseas while reducing their income taxes—from a maximum personal tax rate as high as 92 percent in President Eisenhower’s time—transferring $trillions that once went to the 80 percent of Americans earning salaries to the oligarchs that owned the capital and became “rentiers”; i.e., living off the capital created by their workers.
Trump wants a return to the era because it’s how he made his money. Who better than a convicted felon, a “liar and cheat” his whole life in the words of his erstwhile attorney Michael Cohen, to con Americans into believing that a tariff war against the whole world is the best way to bring back our manufacturing industry that has already migrated to Southeast Asia and China?
He has rationalized the economic chaos his tax war is creating with the promised goal of returning to an earlier era when we were a manufacturing superpower. But workers had fewer rights and benefits until Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Are we to believe it justifies more tax cuts for himself and his oligarchs that will grow our record federal debt ever higher, endangering the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. Government, as well as creating another era of stagflation with possible double-digit inflation and interest rates as happened in the 1970s?
Trump is attempting to recreate a time (1900) when we invaded and occupied Cuba and the Philippines. The reason for his nonsensical pronouncements that Canada should become our 51st state and Greenland a U.S. territory now begin to make sense.
Democrats do have an answer to the huge wealth gap between blue states and red states that might bring US back to present times. Start with small steps such as lobbying to raise the national minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour to what it is today when inflation adjusted—$10.50/hour. That is already the case in 30 of the mostly blue states, where the minimum wage has risen above $15 per hour.
It will be a terrific struggle that will take time. President Trump and Republicans have erected such a wall of ignorance to protect his administration—officials of such incompetence that they lack the ability to even think for themselves that they will obey his commands without question and even anticipate them beforehand (Pete Hegseth, et. al.).
We aren’t a country of stupid people that can’t see the erosion of rights and civil liberties the Trump administration is justifying that enacts a return to an earlier century. The mass protests and demonstrations against Trump and Musk’s chainsaw tactics are proving it.
It’s a good time to return the Democratic Party to the party that has always supported greater equality for wage-earners and farmers. That is the best way Democrats can block Trump’s impossible time travel back to an earlier century that no longer exists.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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