Trump's Art of the Steal

 Popular Economics Weekly

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” Author Tony Schwartz

Huffington Post

Tony Schwartz should have named his 1987 Trump biography “The Art of the Steal.” Trump’s main talent has been his ability to steal from others.

Trump’s Republican-engineered shutdown that allowed no Democratic input is his latest theft. Refusing to negotiate the continuing resolution (CR) with Democrats caused the shutdown, which will give Trump an excuse for even more job losses, cost-cutting and closing of government services, as well as essential services for social security, Medicare and Medicaid, while downsizing Obamacare benefits by as much as 70 percent.

It’s becoming obvious that Trump and his Republican accomplices are stealing as much as they can from the American people in his second term.

Americans are paying in a big way. Higher everyday prices to begin with for groceries, energy, and even higher interest rates. The Federal Reserve has been reluctant to lower interest rates until now because of the rising inflation levels due to the rising costs from Trump’s tariffs.

His thievery has been well documented, lately in Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner’s best seller, Lucky Loser, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, that documents the con artist he really is.

“Donald Trump came to be imbued with a host of attributes that speak to how we confer status and admiration in modern America. Our awe of celebrity. Our tendency to conflate the trappings of wealth with expertise and ability. Our eagerness to believe people of apparent status will not lie to us. Our inability to distinguish the fruits of hard work from those of sheer luck.”.

It's a sordid tale, because he has stolen from friends and foes alike. So why have Republicans allowed the wholesale stealing, who were once the party of President Nixon that signed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency into law?

It is only possible because of the intentional dumbing down of a political party that came to rely on conspiracy theories instead of facts, according to conservative journalist Matt Lewis 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.”

Why? Because it became the party of the super wealthy that could only maintain power by hiring the “divisive and dumb”, as Trump has done, to run the Republican Party and his government.

Trump’s recommendation of bleach injections and the downplay of mask use to treat the COVID-19 pandemic were an attempt to dumb down his electorate, and many MAGA supporters died because of it.

Author Tony Schwartz attributed Trump’s inability to focus on any subject for more than a few minutes to his short attention span. But the chaos that followed disguised his real intentions; to steal from whomever he is dealing with, such as the students of his faux Trump University, the workers he never paid that built his Atlantic City casinos, multiple bankruptcies, and his own charitable foundation that he milked for his own use.

Why would one political party become so devoid of basic truths that they follow a man who says climate change is a hoax while experiencing more frequent floods, fires, tornadoes and rising sea levels with their own eyes?

How many more jobs will be lost, more natural disasters and pandemics and even recessions will occur, before the Republican Party base realizes they’ve been conned and want to become part of a democratic system again in which all are treated equally under the law and our constitution?

It’s what wannabe dictators do to stay in power, if their electorate will allow it.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Consumers Not Very Confident

 Financial FAQs

“Consumer confidence improved in May after five consecutive months of decline,” said Stephanie Guichard, Senior Economist, Global Indicators at The Conference Board. “The rebound was already visible before the May 12 US-China trade deal but gained momentum afterwards.”

Conference Board

The rebound in the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index after its five-month plunge reflects how important China is in providing consumer products, and world trade. It also says consumers will have a very bumpy ride in trying to anticipate what lies ahead.

Why not? Trump has made it clear that the China pause in tariff negotiations is only temporary and that some form of higher import taxes on their products is coming. Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ negotiation tactics will eventually slow foreign trade and encourage higher inflation; just not when it will happen.

So what should consumers and investors do? Economic activity will fluctuate as well—buy the lows (i.e., discounts) and hold onto savings when prices jump. It’s what we all did during past stagflationary times.

Yes, it’s further confirmation that stagflation is on the way with more wild market activity as the public and investors attempt to anticipate what Trump will do next. This is probably why survey consumers still believe a recession could happen.

The Conference Board’s Present Situation Index—based on consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions—rose 4.8 points to 135.9. The Expectations Index—based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions—surged 17.4 points to 72.8, but remained below the threshold of 80, which typically signals a recession ahead.

The above graph is telling us that confidence is down to the level that last prevailed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. What was happening then? Almost no foreign trade because supply chains had been shut down from the pandemic and took years to restore.

President Trump is unfortunately causing the same supply disruptions as happened during the pandemic with his shock and awe tactics. Pandemic shutdowns were the major cause of the soaring inflation at the time (Not Biden’s New Deal legislation).

And it’s happening again. California’s Long Beach and San Pedro ports handle most west coast imports and have reported a 45 percent decline in activity while importers wait to learn what Trump may do next.

It’s the unfortunate consequence of One-man rule. Trump is deciding what the tariff rules are, not Congress. Republicans in this case have given him the power, even though he has been exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior.

Are Republicans choosing to ignore what the public may already be seeing? Is there already a coverup, an attempt to hide his declining mental acuity, as Republicans have accused President Biden’s White House of doing?

Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to another recession.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Inflation Not the Problem

 Financial FAQs

Inflation is close to its long-term 2 percent range, so the Federal Reserve has accomplished its goal of stabilizing prices. Yet the election results show that rising prices since the COVID-19 pandemic most panicked voters; even more than the border crossings, or abortion restrictions, and jobs.

Reuters

So it’s difficult to say whether voters ignored basic economic principles, or ideologies triumphed common sense, so that many voters needed to blame someone for their anxieties and wanted to “throw out the bums” they believed caused it.

It is how democracies work. This reaction happened in most of the developed world where ruling majorities were blamed for the effects of the pandemic that damaged their economies.

But in the U.S. it was too much prosperity, not too little. The Bidenomics’ bills pumped an enormous amount of investments into our economy to build a larger industrial base, modernize our infrastructure and moderate the global warming.

And many voters didn’t seem to understand how it affected the most basic law of economics: the Law of Supply and Demand. It postulates that prices rise when there isn’t enough of something consumers want, and they fall when there is a surplus.

Only now has the supply of goods and services caught up with demand, which is why consumers continued to buy as prices rose, because the U.S. economy is fully employed and consumers weren’t worried about losing their jobs. The historically low number of workers applying for jobless benefits confirms this.

Yet voters were still unhappy. Everyone had a job that wanted one, yet wages for many weren’t rising as fast as the cost of everything since the pandemic.

Why? Because it took several years for the supply chains to recover, which meant the Federal Reserve had to raise interest rates to stabilize prices, making things even more expensive.

What can’t happen, however is for most prices to return to levels before the pandemic unless there is another recession—except for energy prices (gas, natural gas, electricity) because they can fluctuate wildly even in normal times. So energy prices have returned to more normal levels. Average gas prices, for instance, have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Consumer prices rose enough in October to keep the rate of inflation slightly above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent goal, The consumer price index (CPI) climbed 0.2 percent for the fourth month in a row, the government said Wednesday, matching economists’ forecast. It rose 2.6 percent in a year from September’s 2.4 percent inflation rate, marking the first upturn in seven months.

This could be problem, especially if some Republican priorities are enacted, such a more tax cuts, which might cause the Fed to hold off cutting interest rates further. It would probably hurt both stock and bond prices, for starters, and slow growth further in what is already a slowing economy.

On a more cheerful note, now that prices stabilized, the natural rise of wages will catch up with those newly stabilized prices and most of us will feel reassured—unless there’s another economic shock.

That could be a larger war, or a climate disaster. Americans are already experiencing a greater frequency of such shocks with more tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and floods. So newly elected congress men and women, please, please, don’t cut the funding of the Environmental Protection Agency, or FEMA!

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Has dismantling of American health care system begun?

Financial fAQs

We now know that the revised Republican repeal of Obamacare is really intended to dismantle and perhaps destroy any federally-funded health care program, which would return health care to either cash-starved states or private industry; to the high cost, broken healthcare system it was before Obamacare. And all this is to give the wealthiest among us a tax break they don’t need?

We know because the CBO and JCT estimate just out says that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under H.R. 1628 than under current law. The increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number projected under current law would reach 19 million in 2020 and 23 million in 2026.

We also know this because no public hearings were held on the House plan and none are planned for the still-secret Senate plan, something that Senator Diane Feinstein said has never happened before for major legislation in her 40 years in Congress.

And it is a very major bill. For instance, in 2026, an estimated 51 million people under age 65 would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law, according to the CBO. Under the legislation, a few million of those people would use tax credits to purchase policies that would not cover major medical risks, but their costs would rise because no longer protected by the ACA prohibition against raising costs for those with pre-existing conditions, for example.

It therefore dismantles the possibility of affordable health care that covers pre-existing conditions for most Americans. It gives businesses and the wealthiest a juicy $664 billion reduction in taxes, which are the tax revenues needed to pay for the Obamacare state subsidies—mainly to reimburse states that cover their poorest Medicaid citizens. So, it’s to be paid for with a total of $1.111B in spending cuts for Medicaid and social security disability coverage.

 Graph: CBO

It is what the white racist agenda of Tea Party Republicans and President Trump is leading us towards. It is what they mean by making American great again. Let us hope there are enough intelligent Senators to block what is being done in secrecy, in the hopes that most Americans won’t notice there is nothing great about leaving a total of 53 million in 10 years—mostly the elderly and poor—without any healthcare options except the most expensive, and a budget that wants to continue to redistribute our tax dollars to the wealthiest one percent where it will do the least good.

And in a coda, Senate Republicans face increasing pressure to rescue health insurance markets and protect coverage for millions of Americans amid growing fears that the Trump administration is going to let the markets collapse, said the LA Times.

This is because President Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal aid that helps millions of low-income Americans afford their deductibles and co-pays.  The aid, which reimburses insurers for lowering out-of-pocket costs for low-income consumers, was paid by the Obama administration. But it is now the subject of a lawsuit by congressional Republicans, who argue Congress must approve the payments.

In recent days, leading hospitals, physician groups, health insurers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pleaded with the Senate to step in, effectively going around the White House.

“Congress must take action now,” the groups warned in a letter to Republican and Democratic Senate leaders. “At this point, only congressional action can help consumers.”

Can it be any clearer that health care coverage for many, if not most Americans, is in danger of collapse? 

Harlan Green © 2017

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

Why is Donald Trump Acting Like A Russian Oligarch?

It’s becoming clear why Presidential Candidate Trump and Russian President Putin have been so chummy with each other. Trump has become dependent on Russian oligarchs to fund his real estate ventures, since U.S. banks no longer will because of his various bankruptcies and history of failure to pay his debts.

One of his sons even admitted so. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

And the FBI has nothing to say about the fact that Donald Trump has become so dependent on Russian oligarchs. Yet what looks like blatant collusion in illegal activity between Trump and Russian oligarchs has been documented in lawsuits, and much more since the Donald has been unable to borrow from U.S. banks.

He has had to depend on Russian oligarch monies, many of them either Russian Mafia figures or close associates of Vladimir Putin, to fund his real estate empire. And he has repaid them by adopting their playbook—discredit NATO and U.S. alliances, call for hacking of Hillary’s emails, and lauding Putin as a stronger leader than President Obama..

That is why the latest FBI fiasco—Director Comey’s refusal to discuss their ongoing investigation into Donald Trump’s Russian connections—is so damaging to our national security, even though he had no problem discussing their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s “extremely careless” use of a private email server. It means the FBI has lost credibility as a transparent and impartial institution.

Trump’s Russian connections have been well documented. Let’s ignore the possible link to Vladimir Putin, which he claims to never have met, though he did invite him to a meeting when Trump brought his 2013 Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

The real connections are with those Russian oligarchs surrounding Putin, which number some 120 billionaires that own most of Russia’s assets, according to a former Russian hedge fund manager. Many have invested in Trump properties. The fact that Trump won’t disclose his taxes is almost proof in itself that he doesn’t want those connections revealed.

Why wouldn’t Trump want to reveal the extent of those connections, if legal? Because much of it could be laundered money that Russia’s plutocrats have stolen from Russians, and their own government.

A Times Magazine article detailed this. As major banks in America stopped lending him money, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows. What’s more, several of Trump’s senior advisors have business ties to Russia or its satellite politicians, such as former campaign manager Paul Manafort..
It also explains why Russia has been hacking DNC email accounts, including that of Clinton Campaign Chief of Staff John Podesta.

“The Trump-Russia links beneath the surface are even more extensive,” Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “The Russians have every reason to sabotage the Democratic candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, is more pro-Russia than any previous presidential candidate.  As far back as 2007, Trump was telling CNN that Russian President Vladimir Putin was doing a “great job.” In 2013, Trump tweeted: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?”

“In 2015, Trump told MSNBC that Putin was a real leader, said Boot, “unlike what we have in this country,” and that reports of Putin killing political opponents didn’t bother him — “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also,” he said..”

Trump has become so popular with Russian oligarchs because he is willing to aid and abet the laundering of their money, in other words, mostly obtained by criminal activity.

Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has written and testified extensively how President Putin and his cronies have milked the Russian economy in his best-seller, Red Notice, A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.

In Browder’s case, Putin, et. al. were able to obtain a refund of Hermitage Capital’s last $230 million tax payment to the Russian Government in 2005 by simply raiding their Moscow offices and changing corporate ownership documents, then altering the corporate tax returns for that year so they would show a loss of $230 million, which was then refunded to the new ‘owners’, who were revealed to be members of the FSB, Russia’s FBI and Secret Service, and government officials that aided in the tax fraud.

This was all revealed in testimony before the U.S. Congress and European Parliament, and has resulted in the seizure of foreign assets and travel bans for 38 of those implicated in the scheme.

We therefore have to ask why the FBI won’t reveal details of their ongoing investigation of Donald Trump’s Russian connections that have already been so damaging to our election process, and could cause even more damage to our national security in the future?

Harlan Green © 2016

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

Stricter Gun Controls Now Inevitable

Financial FAQs

You know the tide has turned against gun violence when even the American Medical Association calls it a public health menace at the finish of its annual convention.

“CHICAGO – In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history and with more than 6,000 deaths already in 2016 from gun violence, the American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution,” said its press release.

Additionally, at the Annual Meeting of its House of Delegates, the AMA resolved to actively lobby Congress to overturn legislation that for 20 years has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence.

This is after the US Senate could not even agree on banning gun purchases for anyone on the terrorism watch list in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre. You know it’s a public health menace when such mass killings are the work of both domestic and foreign terrorists, whether at Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando.

You know more effective gun control measures are coming, including the banning of military assault weapons like the AR-15, when Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed stating that more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States — a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

“When 50 people were shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando,” wrote Kristof, “the toll from gun murders this year rose to somewhere around 6,000 deaths, which means if the trend continues, this year may end up with the highest gun homicide count since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Add to the homicide number the 550 or so victims of police shootings, roughly the same number of accidental gun deaths and the 21,000+ Americans who use a gun to end their own lives, and the total gun mortality number this year may go above 35,000.”

And now the women are getting together, as did those MADD women that enabled stricter drunk driving laws. (You would think the insurance companies would be behind this initiative as well, for all the money in lawsuits they would save.)

Recently, a powerful new gun control group has emerged, called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom’s Demand Action.

This is while former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was getting ready to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but it lacked foot soldiers. So today Bloomberg and the women’s groups have merged together with 3.5 million supporters.

And the nail in the coffin of unregulated gun violence may have been supplied by the now 8-member Supreme Court which allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in last week's massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semiautomatic rifles.

“"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence," said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. "Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries."

So we can now have a discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics—eradication of the carriers of that violence; which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons.

Harlan Green © 2016

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

Why Does Bernie Love Denmark?

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is breathing fire on the campaign trail these days, including his most recent campaign speech that advocated the breakup of too-big-to fail banks.  "We will no longer tolerate an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else," said Sanders.

Then why does Senator Bernie Sanders love Denmark, and has been mentioning it and the other Scandinavian countries as ideal models for a developed country, one he would like the U.S. to emulate?

“In Denmark, social policy in areas like health care, child care, education and protecting the unemployed are part of a "solidarity system" that makes sure that almost no one falls into economic despair,” he said in a 2015 Huffington Post article. “Danes pay very high taxes, but in return enjoy a quality of life that many Americans would find hard to believe.”

 A recent Center For Economic Policy and Research report highlighted the differences between Nordic countries and the United States.  The differences are mainly because of their superior social safety nets.

           
For instance, the U.S. has the lowest average longevity at 78.8 years, vs. Denmark’s 80 years, while citizens of Iceland and Sweden live 82 years.  Do their colder climates have something to do with it?  No, more likely is the fact that they have to work fewer hours for almost the same income, with better health, educational and retirement outcomes.

  

It’s well-known that U.S. health care costs are double that of all other developed countries, as are infant mortality rates, while homicide rates are more than double of any other developed country.  We know, for instance, there are more than 32,000 gun deaths per year in the U.S., with the majority due to suicides—which also tells us the mental toll that comes with an inadequate social safety net that doesn’t support its citizens.

So it should be no surprise the U.S. has the highest income developed world, before and after taxes and transfers. The higher the Gini Coefficient number portrayed in the graph, the higher the inequality.  With the exception of the United States, there is a perfect correlation between market inequality and the role of fiscal policy in reducing inequality.

That is to say, western capitalist-oriented economies generate profits that go to the major wealth holders, so fiscal policies need to rebalance this effect.  And that is what the Nordic countries in particular, do so well.  “Countries with greater levels of market income inequality are more proactive at reducing inequality through their tax and spending systems,” says the CEPR.

Then why is there opposition in our Congress, particularly, to U.S. citizens having the same benefits as other developed countries, when we are supposed to be the richest country in the world?  It’s the successful opposition to higher taxes by the wealthiest among US.  The wealthiest have succeeded in reducing their taxes and tax rates since President Reagan, the first ultra-conservative Republican president.

The result is ugly—and shows the U.S. is not the land of opportunity for many Americans.  Instead, we have the result of a largely unregulated financial system--higher death rates, violent crime and incarceration rates, as well as inadequately funded health care, retirement, and educational systems. 

 

Harlan Green © 2016

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