It's the Law of the Jungle

 Financial FAQs

"Trumpian Incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand—that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at and abroad, that are actually the source of American’s long-term might.” David Brooks NY Times

I wonder what Republicans expected when they allowed Donald Trump to choose the least-qualified candidates to run his government and carry out their agenda of deregulation, tax cuts and tariffs?

Republicans made the same mistake with GW Bush when his tax cuts and deregulation push led to the first $1 trillion budget deficit, liar loans, the housing bubble and Great Recession.

Why has the stock market fallen 10 percent from its post-Biden high, in what is called a “correction”, and in danger of falling further into recession territory? Because it is becoming obvious to Wall Street that the Trump administration, once again, doesn’t know what it is doing.

Only this time they are doing it on steroids by adding Elon Musk with his chainsaw into the mix. The result has been the destruction of whole agencies that protect us against diseases and pandemics, climate disasters, and health of the economy, since Trump’s tariffs are making no economic sense.

It is the natural consequence of President Trump wanting to destroy our closest alliances with a trade war and allying himself with the Putins and Kim Jong un’s of the world that kill their citizens with impunity, where the only law is might makes right.

He is attempting to bring back the Law of the Jungle in installing a government with those that will only obey him, an impossible situation in the modern world that can only precipitate another Great Recession, or even Great Depression.

President Biden did the right thing with his New, New Deal legislation by working with congress to modernize our infrastructure and manufacturing that has brought back 700,000 manufacturing jobs.

Foreign governments are already retaliating against Trump’s tariffs, creating a trade war that no one can win. The aluminum and steel tariffs will drive a hole in the US auto industry, say their CEOs, when the Great Recession had once before bankrupted them so that President Obama and congress agreed to bail them out.

Trump was able to fool American voters into a second term because of their wholesale ignorance of the US economy and its position in the world. The US is still the world’s wealthiest country that recovered most quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic yet has also the most unequal wealth and income disparities in the developed world.

The Last Tech Age

When I last wrote about our wealth gap in 2017, the U.S. was in 106th place of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook. The Gini Index compiled by the CIA measures and compares living standards.

The U.S. had a Gini inequality index on the level of Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the income gap between the wealthy and poor citizens of a country.

It is why we have such a partisan divide between Democrat-led blue states and Republican-led red states that Republican tax cuts and record budget deficits most harmed.

Donald Trump has always wanted tax cuts because he has barely paid any taxes himself. But this is only because he has extorted, stiffed and lied to so many people and institutions when running the Trump Organization. Why would he behave differently as president?

We are already “hearing the truth” about the havoc his “extortion machine” is wreaking. When will we be ready for “a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth ?“

When the damage is so great that Americans become “as mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.”

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made a promise at this year’s Democratic Convention. She would create programs that give every American the opportunity to better themselves.

“I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world. That here, in this country, anything is possible. That nothing is out of reach. An America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”

Equal opportunity hasn’t been available to many Americans, even though it is part of the American Dream—America is the land of opportunity that is taught in schools and heard by immigrants.

Why? Because it is also part of a larger truism that not all Americans have accepted: Equality Is Good for Everyone. It should be self-evident, a statement of common sense. The more equality of opportunity among us, the more we can better ourselves, become more productive citizens, which in turn increases our national wealth (and lowers budget deficits).

It was certainly the dream of immigrants, such as my mother, a British citizen born in Jamaica.

But there are times, such as today, when many Americans don’t believe it is possible, which is why we are living in another Gilded Age with the worst income inequality of the developed world. It is on a par with developing countries in Africa and has been the major cause of recessions, including the Great Recession.

Many have bought the counter narrative by those that don’t like equality, the privileged few at the top of the income ladder who want us to believe they are the most qualified to create greater wealth for the rest of us.

This Gilded Age was formed from supply-side, trickle-down economic policies, because enough Americans believed it, believed government was the problem and cutting taxes the solution, believed that equality is not good for everyone because we live in a zero-sum world with limited resources. What is given to one must be taken from another.

The conservative position espoused by 1970s Economist Arthur Okun, for instance, was that greater equality meant less market efficiencies to produce and so fewer incentives for greater wealth, since leveling the playing field meant leveling out the opportunity for large profits.

But that has never been the case. There has always been copious evidence that the opposite is true; that overly large profits have led to diminished household wealth.

One can measure inequality with such as the CIA’s World Factbook that ranks inequality among nations. Those with the greatest equality also have less violence, greater freedoms, greater health, and guaranteed vacations!

Richard Wilkinson’s TEDx lecture and book with Kate Pickett, “The Spirit Level” is one of the best studies of the dire effects of income inequality on the quality of life. The most important factor, and a sign of dire consequences when inequality has approached the level of the Great Depression, are the US violent crime and incarceration rates, which Wilkinson discusses at length. The U.S. is by far the most violent country in the world—worse than any other developed country with the highest incarceration rates.

Efforts to reverse such inequality have begun on the local levels, even if congressional conservatives have blocked raising the miniscule minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

I wrote in 2011 that the state of Massachusetts was the first to raise their minimum wage to $10 per hour, California is raising it to $8.25 over 2 years, with New Jersey and other states to follow. It was the beginning of a return to greater equality that has continued.

And there is an increasing awareness of the income disparities, such as the fact that corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the income of their employees, and certain hedge fund managers have reported an annual income of $1 billion.

The Center for American Progress launched the Washington Center For Equitable Growth, which aims to deepen the economic critique of inequality. It was set up by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, among others, who is known with his partner Thomas Piketty as the first economists to historically research the history of income distribution over the past 100 years.

As the mission statement of the Center says:
"New research suggests that growing inequality in the United States may have broad social and economic effects -- by reducing stable demand for goods and services, dampening entrepreneurialism, undermining the inclusiveness and responsiveness of political and economic institutions, limiting access to education, and stunting individual development. Yet our understanding of how these mechanisms interact with the broader economy is limited."

Kamala Harris said as much in her acceptance speech: “opportunity is not available to everyone. That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”

A majority of Americans and a majority of Electoral College votes must agree with her for this to happen in November.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What is This Election Really About?

 Answering the Kennedys’ Call

#eisenhower

Now is the time to cure our record income and wealth inequality, since it’s not only adversely affecting the most vulnerable during this pandemic—including our mostly low-income essential health care and public safety workers—but overall economic growth, and hence any chance of a robust recovery from the current pandemic-induced recession.

According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research cited in an LA Times Op-ed, before the pandemic the U.S. counted 30 million workers in the categories we now consider essential: grocery clerks, nurses, cleaners, line cooks, warehouse workers, bus drivers and more. According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in early May, 1 in 4 essential workers report having difficulties affording basic household expenses, and 1 in 7 are uninsured.

President Eisenhower’s admonition that corporations must pay their fair share to support economic growth is part of the solution to those problems.

I’ve written before about the growing income and wealth inequality that puts America’s distribution of family income ranking closer to Cameroon and Mozambique than the developed countries, according to the CIA World Factbook.

But the coronavirus pandemic has made returning to some degree of income equality that last prevailed in the 1970s more urgent than ever. Our record income and wealth inequality is a major reason for the growth in low-income workers.

U.S. economic growth has been anemic since the Great Recession—even with Republicans’ spectacular 2017 tax cut bill that mostly benefited Wall Street and corporations. The tax cuts were designed to benefit corporations, whose tax rate was cut to a rock bottom 21 percent from 36 percent, giving corporations a profit windfall.

So the upcoming presidential election is really about reversing the huge transfer of wealth (currently $1 trillion per year, per NY Times David Leonhardt) since 1980 when President Reagan’s so-called trickle-down economics program that advocated lower taxes and fewer government regulations took hold.

President Eisenhower’s simple explanation for the 90 percent maximum corporate tax rate that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s was to encourage corporations to grow and develop “new locations, new hires, new equipment, new product research and development” that would grow the country, rather than “hoard it and pay Uncle Sam.”

But something happened in the 1970s to make taxes and big government unpopular, says Kurt Andersen in his new book, Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America (2020, Random House).

Higher marginal tax rates that squeezed growing middle class incomes was certainly part of it, but anti-government, anti-labor sentiments and policies enacted during the 1980s that lowered maximum tax rates put the finishing touches on any possibility of income equality for the 80 percent of salaried workers that no longer shared in the productivity gains from government-financed Research & Development (e.g., Internet, AI, space exploration).

Rutgers University economic historian James Livingston sounded the alarm in a well-known NY Times Op-ed: It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid, some years ago when he showed that corporations for the most part have been using their profits to speculate rather than invest in their future. With lower tax rates they no longer had the incentive to invest in the public good (and America’s future), in other words.

“Between 1900 and 2000, real gross domestic product per capita (the output of goods and services per person) grew more than 600 percent,” said Professor Livingston. “Meanwhile, net business investment declined 70 percent as a share of G.D.P...Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.”

In other words, this election is not only about choosing a government that can vanquish COVID-19 with effective health care policies, it’s about improving the lives of most Americans. We know there are many programs that would improve income inequality—beginning with a higher minimum wage, enhanced public spending on a better social safety net.

Raising corporate taxes back to historical levels is a start that would enable government to finance some of those necessary changes; or corporations could again heed President Eisenhower’s admonition and spend their monies where it will do the most public good.

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Record Income Inequality = U.S. Credit Downgrade?

Financial FAQs

Graph: MarketWatch

The current debate whether the U.S. will escape the ‘new normal’ of slower economic growth since the Great Recession (when homeowners lost a collective $9 trillion in value) is taking a new turn with Moody’s Investor Services now warning of a credit rating downgrade of U.S. Treasury securities from its AAA rating, something Standard & Poor’s had already done in 2011 when Republicans threatened to shut down the Federal government over their refusal to raise the debt ceiling.

Why the Moody’s downgrade now, when it has kept U.S. sovereign debt at AAA rating? America’s income inequality has worsened since the Great Recession and more pressure will be put on our government to increase so-called transfer payments—especially social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government benefits paid to seniors and lower income household just to keep them out of poverty—at a time of record federal debt, said Moody’s.

Only the top 10 percent income earners have seen their incomes increase since the Great Recession. Most American households have seen either flat income growth or an actual decline for the bottom 40 percent of income earners.

In fact, the income declines have been happening since the 1970s, as globalization of the workforce by multi-national U.S. corporations have steadily shipped many of the best paying manufacturing jobs to cheaper countries and regions, while American workers’ salary bargaining rights have been steadily chipped away by more conservative congresses and compliant Republican and Democratic administrations.

Now new evidence has surfaced of another reason for decline in higher-paying jobs—robots, mainly concentrated in manufacturing regions. The Brookings Institute originated a study on the effects of robots replacing mainly manufacturing jobs. To no one’s surprise, most of the robots are concentrated in ‘rust-belt’ manufacturing right-to-work states in the Midwest and South that severely restrict union collective bargaining rights.

Brookings Institute

Brookings’ analysis of data from the International Federation for Robotics determined that more than half of more than 233,000 industrial robots in the country are found in just 10 Midwestern and Southern states, led by Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. As of 2016, the overall national average for red states” was 2.5 robots per thousand workers. The national average for blue states that mainly vote Democrat was 1.1 per thousand.

Moody’s has become decidedly pessimistic about the future of America’s credit worthiness because it sees little that the U.S. can do to mitigate the increased income inequality, the worst in developed countries “…fiscal consolidation efforts that attempt to reduce the burden of entitlement spending, by hiking payroll taxes or cutting benefits, would ultimately exacerbate inequality,” said Moody’s.

What can be done to reduce the worst household income inequality since 1928, just prior to the Great Depression? The CIA World Factbook ranks the U.S. 39^th from the bottom in the distribution of family income based on the Gini Coefficient Index that measures income inequality.

I respectively disagree with Moody’s pessimism about the prospects for improving U.S. credit worthiness. Cutting benefits would certainly harm growth, taking away incomes that increases consumer spending of the bottom 40 percent; spending that in turn increases tax revenues. And states with the political will to restore bargaining rights of union and government workers would restore some of the lost wages that increase tax revenues.

Then there is a need for massive investments in public infrastructure in all the sectors that increase efficiency and labor productivity—from physical structures to education and R&D that sent us to the moon and created the Internet. Studies show they more than pay for themselves, which also increases tax revenues and pays down federal debt.

There is in fact no reason for pessimism if such ‘antidotes’ are applied to America’s ailing fiscal health, and Moody’s as a responsible credit rating agency should be the first to recommend them.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why Aren't Wages Rising Faster?

Popular Economics Weekly

Everything should point to higher wages and salaries ahead for employees with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate and record corporate profits, but corporate profits go mainly to their executives and owners (and their stockholders) these days. The result is stagnant wages and household incomes.

Graph: Econoday

“Real", or inflation adjusted average hourly earnings slipped 2 tenths in July to a year-on-year 0.7 percent. This reading has been under the 1 percent line since October last year. The monthly reading for this measure did finally show some life in the prior week's employment report with an unadjusted 0.3 percent gain, but it will take a continued run of strength to level out the 2-year trend line which remains in a deep downslope, says Econoday.

It’s as if corporate bosses no longer are interested in maximizing their growth, which is the normal way to maximize profits. They have been successful in boosting profits, but mainly through financial engineering—that is, stock buybacks paid with borrowed money, or mergers and acquisitions that consolidate markets into fewer players.

This increases their monopoly powers to boost profits and resist employee calls for higher wages. It has helped to keep the stock market humming, but not the economic growth that should accompany such profits.

Wages in the United States increased 2.95 percent in May of 2017 over the same month in the previous year. But a better idea of healthy wage growth in the United States is a historical average of 6.26 percent from 1960 until 2017, reaching an all-time high of 13.77 percent in January of 1979 and a record low of -5.77 percent in March of 2009, according to Trading Economics.

Graph: Trading Economics

This is what normal wage growth should look like, if workers were earning a living wage, and inflation was rising at a normal rate. The inflation rate in the United States averaged 3.28 percent from 1914 until 2017, and was 14 percent in 1980. Wages since then have been suppressed in the name of suppressing inflation, as employees’ bargaining power has been curtailed.

That’s why the national minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour, last raised in 2009, though some cities and states are beginning to raise it to $15 per hour, which is what economists calculate is the minimum living wage for a family of four. And that is just enough to cover what a household has to pay for housing, gas, food, clothing, and other everyday items.

But it’s an uphill battle when business interests rule the markets with little push back or bargaining power held by 80 percent of the workforce that are wage earners, and we wonder why so many refuse to return to work. So we shouldn’t wonder why U.S. labor productivity, which ultimately sets our standard of living, has remained so low of late. It increased at an average annual 2.5 percent from 1948-2007, but just 1.2 percent from 2010-14.

It’s also the reason the U.S. have the highest income inequality in the developed world. The U.S. ranks 106th of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. 

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why are Americans So Unhealthy?

Financial FAQs

Americans have just avoided a health care disaster in voting down the Senate’s ‘skinny’ Obamacare Repeal and Replace bill. Even though maintaining most of the taxes to pay for the Medicaid portion, it would have made insurance coverage prohibitively expensive for those older and sicker users with the removal of the private and employer mandate requirements that would cause younger and healthier people to leave the insurance markets.

This is really the latest precipice that’s been averted. Americans already have the worst health outcomes in the developed world, precisely because America is the only developed country—in fact, of most of the rest of the undeveloped world—that doesn’t have universal coverage.

The result is one of the highest birth death rates, as well as heart, diabetes, and infectious disease rates—which are diseases usually associated with poorer, undeveloped countries and regions.

Why has this happened in the America? Because Americans have the worst income inequality in the developed world, according to the CIA World Factbook. And studies have shown that those countries with the greatest inequality also rank lowest in healthcare benefits.

Graph: Last Tech Age

The U.S. ranks 106^th of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings, as I’ve highlighted in past columns. The higher the index in the graph, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

This is while congress has even been attempting to take away Medicaid benefits for the poor, elderly and infirmed? It doesn’t compute. Just 3 Senators—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and John McCain—were courageous enough to stand up to the conservative lobbies that would only worsen healthcare outcomes.

What if conservatives had succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans' Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year, and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment, the report found.”

On the other hand, a 2016 Commonwealth Club study lists Obamacare’s many benefits. “…evidence indicates that the ACA has likely acted as an economic stimulus, in part by freeing up private and public resources for investment in jobs and production capacity. Moreover, the law’s payment and other cost-related reforms appear to have contributed to the marked slowdown in health spending growth seen in recent years.”

Some of those benefits are:

· Health care spending growth per person—both public and private—has slowed for five years.
 
· A number of ACA reforms, particularly related to Medicare, have likely contributed to the slowdown in health care spending growth by tightening provider payment rates and introducing incentives to reduce excess costs. 

· Faster-than-expected economic growth and slower-than-expected health care spending have led to multiple downward revisions of the federal deficit and projected deficits.

· These trends have also been a boon to state and local government budgets, as job growth has improved state tax revenues while cost growth in health care programs has slowed. At the same time, expanding insurance to millions of people who were previously uninsured has supported local health systems and enhanced families’ ability to pay for necessities, including health care.

· The accrued savings in health care spending relative to their projected growth prior to the ACA are substantial: Medicare alone is now projected to spend $1 trillion less between 2010 and 2020.

We can thank Senators Merkowski, Collins, and McCain that the so-called ‘freedom’ lobbies behind the Obamacare repeal efforts have not succeeded in making more Americans ill. I don’t even want to imagine the increased death totals due to lack of care of the 32 million aged and infirm that could ultimately lose their coverage.

So now is the time, in Senator McCain’s words, for Republicans and Democrats to work together in “regular order” to craft a truly bipartisan healthcare bill that could actually improve the health of Americans.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen