The Too Dumb to Fail Party

 Financial FAQs

“In November 2021, (President Biden) signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Then, in August 2022, he signed the CHIPS bill, which invests $280 billion in semiconductor manufacturing. Days later, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests $370 billion in clean energy and related infrastructure, along with provisions designed to reduce health care costs.” Washington Monthly

perseusbooks.com

How sad it is that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery, has become the party of a wannabe dictator Too Dumb to Fail in the words of author and journalist Matt Lewis, that imprisons immigrants of the wrong race and color.

It is a party that has enabled Donald Trump to rely on mostly illegal executive orders, including the tariffs, instead of working with congress as did President Biden to pass his very successful ‘New, New Deal’ legislation that is modernizing the American economy for many years to come.

Trump’s inability to negotiate with congress had as much to do with the Republican Party that had already become the party of the wealthy who owned or stewarded America’s biggest businesses.

“In the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump listed his top 10 legislative priorities as part of his “Contract with the American Voter”, continued the Washington Monthly, which included repeal of the Affordable Care Act, infrastructure investment, harsher prison sentences for immigration violations, and full funding of a border wall to be reimbursed by Mexico. None of that reached his desk.”

That is because the Republican Party learned early they could only hold power if they succeeded in dumbing down their electorate; even before Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down” economic schemes in 1980 that cut the taxes of the wealthiest and social benefits for the rest of Americans to pay for the budget deficits incurred by his tax cuts.

Journalist Matt Lewis said it in his 2016 best-seller, Too Dumb to Fail: “Somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the most recent government shutdown, the conservative movement became neither conservative nor a movement. Hijacked by the divisive and the dumb, it now finds itself hostage to emotions and irrational thinking.

“It became more personal and less principled — more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy. It became its own worst enemy. Where once the movement drew strength from its desire to win the philosophical argument over its adversaries, it now wears its lost causes as badges of honor — expected, like Coriolanus, to show these battle scars as a means of vote mongering.”

I said in a 2015 Huffington Post blog that the result of one political party’s choice to replace scientific facts with conspiracy theories had begun to permeate the American educational system as well.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or “intelligent design,” said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

“After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place,” said Psychology Today. “The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries.”

Even in 2015 Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency and CDC), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can’t be aborted.

Nothing has changed, in other words, except Republicans elected Donald Trump, a man who would be a king, who has suffered from what psychologists and psychiatrists have called a Narcissistic Personality Disorder his whole life, whose father had given him more than $400 million over the years to support his various business ventures, according to the NYTimes.

The results of his father’s wealth are well documented in the book titled, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by NYTimes reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner. Such largesse resulted in a string of business failures and seven bankruptcies.

Now Donald Trump and the Republican Party that supports him have taken the dumbing down of Americans to a whole new level by firing the best and brightest public officials and cutting their research budgets that protect Americans from future pestilences and environmental disasters.

History says the truth will out, eventually. A man and party that is too dumb to fail, that can only rule with lies and deception, must eventually fail. But when, and at what cost to Americans’ health and safety?

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump's Manufacturing Scam

 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

CBPP.org

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 51^st 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

Why Another Gilded Age?

 Financial FAQs

"I remember '29 very well ... the drugged and happy faces of people who built paper fortunes on stocks they couldn't possibly have paid for. ... In our little town bank presidents and track workers rushed to pay phones to call brokers. Everyone was a broker, more or less. At lunch hour, store clerks and stenographers munched sandwiches while they watched stock boards and calculated their pyramiding fortunes. Their eyes had the look you see around a roulette wheel ...but despondency, not prosperity was just around the corner.”—John Steinbeck

Graph: Last Tech Age

This is what happened in the 1920s that led to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Marriner Eccles, Rooselvelt’s New Deal Federal Reserve Chairman was one of the first to characterize the cause of the Great Depression, when he said in testimony before congress that it was the record income inequality of that time:

“The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop—Mariner Eccles, Federal Reserve Chairman during the Great Depression.”

The current Gilded Age began in earnest with the election of President Ronald Reagan and his credo that “government is the problem.” It has resulted in the huge transfer of wealth from workers to the owners of capital—as much as $1trillion, according to some economists—by cutting their taxes and deregulation of whole industries.

Laws were also enacted to weaken labor unions and monoply laws were not enforced so that corporations could transfer their factories overseas where labor was cheaper, basically gutting America’s middle class industrial base that has been the cause of so much anger and despair of America’s workers.

The U.S. is in 106th place 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, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively, as I’ve highlighted in past columns. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

It’s had to believe that we have reached that point once again, a time when today’s wealthiest exceed the wealth of the Vanderbilt’s, Rockefeller’s and Morgan’s tenfold that built those massive 5^th Avenue mansions at the turn of the 20^th Century to show off their wealth, before there was an income tax or Federal Reserve.

It was spawned by an economy fueled by oil, railroads, and a banking system that enabled so many consumers to go into debt, until the stock market crashed on Black Friday of 1929.

History is repeating itself with $Trillioners instead of the $Billionaires (and $Millionaires) of that era because of Sillicon Valley and the Internet that have made an Elon Musk, now the richest person in the world.

But it is at the cost of a greater concentration of wealth than ever. Today’s moguls duplicate the 20^th Century robber barons in wanting to share as little of their wealth as possible—instead, they use their wealth to elect conservative policies that lower tax rates and cut government benefits that protect the other 99 percent of Americans.

Is President Biden’s Bidenomics’s spending of $trillions to modernize America’s industrial base, infrastructure, and mitigate disasters caused by a changing climate the last gasp of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that protect ordinary Americans?

The incoming Trump administration has tasked the richest man in the world to set up a “Department of Government Efficiency”, they say, to downsize or eliminate some of those programs to eliminate waste, but really to shrink or eliminate the health and safety programs; such as the US Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Education department, and even shrink the IRS once again to enable the $Trillionaires to better evade taxes.

Trump is clear about his intentions. He intends to pick a cabinet based on their loyalty to him as he did in his first term. Many have no qualifications; most were lobbyists with blatant conflicts of interest which resulted in many having to resign when their corruption was uncovered.

Such dysfunctional behavoir was a reason President Trump lost the House of Represetatives to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2018, and Trump lost to President Biden in 2020.

Sadly, the incoming all-Republican congress will probably give him the tax cuts, inflationary tariffs and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants that will also be a repeat of Trump’s first term.

And many in the working class who voted for him will suffer again, and as they have throughout Trump’s working life; thanks in large part to the Elon Musk’s of the world that don’t believe in sharing their wealth.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Why Nations Fail

 Popular Economics Weekly

Amazon

The Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded Monday to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research that explains why societies with poor rule of law and exploitative institutions do not generate sustainable growth, as with some U.S. states as well.

Whereas the peoples of more democratic countries with institutions answerable to their citizens are more prosperous than those with weak democratic institutions, such as North Korea, Mexico, Russia, and even China, say the authors of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, two of the new Suth Nobel Laureates.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

The authors use the example of the twin cities of Nogales, Texas and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Anyone driving across the border can see the difference. Nogales, Texas has three times the income level, better roads, schools, and better law enforcement to protect its citizens than Nogales, Sonora that has been ruled by drug cartels.

The contrast between North and South Korea is even greater—a prosperous South Korean government elected by its citizens vs. a North Korean dictatorship that has literally starved its people to keep one family in power.

It’s also a devastating analysis of why we have a partisan divide between red vs. blue states that Republican Parties have been able to capitalize on by falsely rationalizing the reason for their differences; especially economic rationalizations.

It is a case of the exploiters—wealthy individuals who don’t like to share their wealth—blaming a Washington elite that has dominated most government institutions since World War Two.

The truth is Republican Party economic programs have performed badly; causing massive deficits from tax cuts without concomitant growth that would pay for the tax cuts that have made the red states they govern poorer; because Republicans have adopted policies designed to weaken governmental institutions that are protected by the rule of law.

Republicans began to actually break laws with President Nixon’s Watergate break-in, President Reagan’s secret Iran-contra weapon shipment to Khomeini’s Iran, and GW Bush’s fabrications about Sadam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion of Iraq.

It has culminated with Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s outright contempt of laws and even the constitution in not accepting its loss to Democrats and Joe Biden in 2020.

This is born out in the major thesis of this year’s Nobel Prize-winners: that so-called illiberal democracies with central governments only answerable to a powerful minority rather than a majority of its citizens have performed poorly.

Georgetown Public Policy Review

A Georgetown Public Review measured the different median household incomes of red and blue states in the U.S.--$74,000 in blue states vs. $60,000 in red states. It’s in part because most red states have lower minimum wages, and fewer social services such as healthcare for their citizens. And even those social services are mostly subsidized by the federal government.

It is why democracies work best when they follow economic rules that serve the majority, and most in danger when attempts are made to weaken or discredit their institutions. The choice for Americans in the upcoming Presidential election should be clear—belong to a party and vote for a country that works for all of its citizens.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Our Student Debt Problem

Financial FAQs

College students and former students have amassed some $1.5 trillion in student debts, most of it (90 percent) held by the federal government or guaranteed by same. And this is holding back a whole generation of young adults who have to postpone almost everything—marrying, raising a family, buying a home, even finding a desirable job—in order to pay their debts.

Presidential candidates such as Senator Elizabeth Warren Senator are offering a solution to the student debt problem by offering some debt relief based on income. And there are various proposals to reduce student fees for higher education, as well as smaller institutions of higher education that charge little or no fees.

In 1993, the average debt of a bachelor’s degree graduate was approximately $9,000; five years later, it was about $15,000. By 2003, it had jumped to approximately $17,500, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Today, the average outstanding student loan balance per debtor is roughly $30,000, though one recent study by Fidelity Investments put the figure as high as $35,200. Approximately 20 percent of U.S. households currently owe student loan debt, as do 40% of people younger than 35. This means an increase of nearly 200 percent of overall student loan debt (public and private) over the last 20 years.

This is while the wages of middle-class workers have grown just 6 percent since 1979 and low-wage workers’ wages actually dropped 5 percent during that period, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

Marketwatch.com

It is why Senator Elizabeth’s proposal to cancel most public college or university student debts is so important. In the latest Hill-HarrisX survey, 67 percent of respondents between 18 and 64 said they backed Warren's idea compared to 53 percent of voters who were older. The proposal was also supported across all age groupings although voters who are 65 years old and up were somewhat less likely to support it.

What happened to put so much of the burden on students and their families to have what was once affordable to children of a middle-class family? Declining state investment in higher education over the past decades has pushed costs up, making it more difficult for students to afford school on shrinking household incomes, while many more students enrolled in higher education, so that almost 50 percent of the student-age population now attends some college or university.

Something had to give. In the late 1980s, public colleges typically got about one-quarter of their revenue from tuition, now that’s up to about 50 percent, according to Michael Mitchell, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who studies state funding trends.

But there’s an even deeper reason college and university costs have risen with state-chartered public institutions like the University of California and California’s State College systems.

It began just after I left UC Berkeley in 1964, and the protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War began. President Johnson declared war on Vietnam on August 10, 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the Selective Service then made every able-bodied American male 18 year old eligible for the draft. That is when Berkeley’s campus anti-war protests began in earnest.

A coincidence?  I don't think so.  My only ‘tuition’ during my six years from 1958-64 was a $150 administration fee for every semester I attended UC Berkeley, and that was the case until Ronald Reagan became California’s Governor in 1966 when he and fellow conservatives on his Board of Regents, which was mostly made up of successful businessmen, decided that Berkeley students were spending too much time on the streets protesting the war, and not enough time in the classroom.

In 1969, Reagan convinced the Regents to begin to charge “education fees” to students for the privilege of attending such a prestigious institution, even though the UC system was a state-funded institution under the federal land grant act; rather than privately-funded Stanford University.

Its University of California system was created in 1868 with the decree that “admission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state,” and the California State and community-college systems followed suit.

Governor Reagan at his inauguration famously said in reaction to the growing student protests: “Get them out of there, he said. “Throw them out. They are spoiled and don't deserve the education they are getting. They don't have a right to take advantage of our system of education.”

All UC students in the 2019 school year who are residents of California now pay $13,500 per year in tuition fees, while non-residents pay $42,500 per year, according to the UC Admissions Office.

U.S. News and World Reports publishes college rankings as well as those institutions of higher learning with little or no tuition fees. These low or tuition-free colleges are in lesser known states and regions, such as the Dakotas, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky and Texas that give the same quality education without ‘name’ professors; that is, if the student seeks an education that will prepare him or her for meaningful work, rather than a degree from a prestigious and expensive institution (such as UC Berkeley) that that will put him or her on a career track that may turn into a well-worn rut. Even Ivy League Cornell University charges no tuition fee to New York state residents with family incomes of less than $100,000 per year.

Senator Warren’s proposal includes cancelling up to $50,000 in student debt for those that make less than $100,000 a year, with the amount of relief getting gradually smaller as income level goes up, and households that make more than $250,000 not eligible for any debt relief.

Altogether, it would wipe out all student debt — including both federal and private loans — for more than 75 percent of Americans with outstanding loans, according to analysis provided by Warren’s campaign.

These are just a few ideas on how to solve the student debt problem. We know the problem is becoming even more serious as a growing number of students want the advantages of a higher education; the question is how to fix it.

Harlan Green © 2019

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