What Gulf War?

 Financial FAQs

“From the preceding month, the PCE price index for January increased 0.3 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.4 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 3.1 percent from one year ago.” BEA.gov

FREDBrentcrude

Oil prices spiked again on Thursday morning (to $94.35 per barrel) per the above graph on Brent crude oil prices, after Iran’s new leader said the crucial Strait of Hormuz should remain closed and that Iran will continue attacks on its Gulf neighbors,.

And the Fed’s favored inflation index, the Personal Consumption Expenditures core rate of inflation, which omits food and energy, rose by 0.4%. The core rate rose 3.1% in the 12 months ended in January, up from 3.0% in the prior month. It’s the highest rate in almost two years and decidedly not what the Fed wanted to see.

So, this is causing all the financial market indexes to plunge once again as it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Trump has no good reason for attacking Iran that is now morphing into another Gulf War.

“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” said the IEA in its March report released on Thursday that was cited by MarketWatch. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have caused Gulf countries to cut total oil production by at least 10 million barrels per day, the energy body added.

So why shouldn’t President Trump’s new Gulf War repeat the 1970’s Arab Oil Embargo (OPEC) stagflation—slowing economic growth + higher inflation—that caused several recessions and resulted in the double-digit inflation of the era, I said last week.

I’m not the only one bringing up the similarities to 1970’s stagflation. Nobel economist Joseph Stigliz, a Clinton economic advisor who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001, said in a podcast interview with Jack Farley of “Monetary Matters” released on Wednesday, that “We are facing a risk of stagflation with prices going up because of tariffs and war while growth is slowing.” The 92,000 nonfarm payrolls contraction in February was evidence for the slump in economic activity, he said.

And it’s beginning to show up in slower GDP growth. Real gross domestic product (GDP) barely increased at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, revised downward from 1.4 percent, according to the second estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 4.4 percent.

BEA.gov

Oil prices had spiked earlier in June 2025 to $80 per barrel because of the short-lived Israel-U.S. strikes on Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. That should have been a warning of the potential economic damage from a longer war.

The other shoe to drop will be job creation. We are already in a stagnant job market with the loss of -92,000 jobs in February that basically erased the +126,000 job gain in January. Further losses are being hinted at by other indicators, such as the government’s JOLTS report that has shown no net growth in new hires for months.

It’s becoming more obvious that President Trump’s seeming incoherence over the reasons for his new Gulf war is hiding the real reason he started another Gulf War that he blurted out recently:

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

The sad truth is that Trump and his oil buddies are profiteering from a war that Americans, and much of the world, will end up paying for.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Too Few Jobs!

 

Financial FAQs

“The number of job openings was little changed at 7.1 million in November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the month, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each.” BLS.gov

CalculatedRisk

The Labor Department’s JOLTS survey is the first look at job formation before the official December U.S. unemployment report, and it isn’t pretty. The number of job hires equaled the number of ‘separations’, or those leaving the workforce for various reasons—voluntary or involuntary. 

(The blue line is Hires and red bars are Layoffs, Discharges, and other in the Calculate Risk graph. The black line is the total number of Job openings. It has fallen from its high of 12,000,000 job vacancies in 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemic.)

This means existing job positions are being replaced but no additional hires. Companies are holding on to their workforce, in other words, replacing those that are leaving for various reasons, but not expanding their workforce.

Trump’s Labor Department doesn’t tell us why but we can surmise that tariffs are the main culprit, since without the Supreme Court decision, companies don’t know if the existing so-called retaliatory tariffs enacted on April 2 are even legal. Imagine the refunds that the Trump administration has promised to return to importers if SCOTUS rules against him!

The number of hires decreased in state and local government, excluding education (-39,000) and in state and local government education (-31,000). Hires increased in federal government (+11,000), said the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

U.S. manufacturing activity fell to 47.9% in December, the Institute for Supply Management said Monday. This is the lowest reading of the year and the 10th straight month of contraction in the factory sector. Any number below 50% signals contraction.

“Looking at the manufacturing economy, 85 percent of the sector’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted in December, compared to 58 percent in November, and the percentage of manufacturing GDP in strong contraction (defined as a composite PMI^® of 45 percent or lower) increased to 43 percent, compared to 39 percent in November,” said Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

ADP, a private payrolls purveyor, has said that just 41,000 jobs were added to payrolls in December. They were mostly in Leisure/hospitality and Education/healthcare, which means the service sector is still limping along.

This is in fact job stagnation, and with the manufacturing sector still in recession and inflation continuing to rise, it’s looking like overall economic stagflation is afoot.

How is a return of stagflation not inevitable with Republicans and Trump continuing to break up the existing world order? He has basically invaded Venezuela and threatened other countries with military intervention, how could it not be otherwise?

Who will want to do business with America at the point of a gun?

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Equality Is Good For Everyone!

Answering Kennedy’s Call

“And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.” Mitt Romney

Getty/Bettmann

This quote from a recent NYTimes Mitt Romney Op-ed is my Christmas message: 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’s a larger economic truth 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 and the Great Depression.

Many have bought the counter narrative by those that don’t like equality, such as Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, part of 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 like the last Gilded Age of President William McKinley, from a concentration of power among the wealthiest oligarchs. Then it was monopolies in such as the newly created railroad and oil industries.

Today, it is small government policies of Donald Trump that mirror the trickle-down economic policies of President Reagan 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 and breakup of communities.

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 national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour that was last set in 2009.

It is worth just $5 per hour today whereas blue states like California and Connecticut have raised their minimum wage to $16.90 per hour in line with rising livings costs.

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.

The mission statement of the Center explains why it is needed:

“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.”

Mitt Romney’s Op-ed has voiced one of the major issues confronting Americans today—how to fix the overwhelming federal debt load that threatens the ‘full faith and credit’ of the U.S. government.

“The largest source of additional tax revenues is also probably the most compelling for the fairness and social stability. Some call it closing a tax code loophole but the term “loopholes” grossly understates their scale. “Caverns” or “caves” would be more fitting,” said Romney

Donald Trump’s flailing attempts to use higher tariffs to pay down federal debt, when it is in fact another tax on all Americans, is maybe the most important reason to follow Mitt Romney’s advice.

Taxing the wealthiest that haven’t been “paying their fair share”—including Donald Trump’s billionaire supporters, would close one of the largest loopholes that is endangering the U.S. economy, as Senator Bernie Sanders continually reminds us.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Still Flying Blind--Part II

 Financial FAQs

“Hiring has been choppy of late as employers weather cautious consumers and an uncertain macroeconomic environment. And while November's slowdown was broad-based, it was led by a pullback among small businesses.” ADP

wallpaperaccess.com

We know why consumer confidence has plunged to a new post-pandemic low. We have no news of current economic conditions to guide consumers and investors, much less what may happen next, so the U.S. economy is still flying blind.

The November unemployment report comes out on December 16, for instance, (skipping October’s report) after the Fed’s FOMC meet that decides whether another rate cut is appropriate, so we have only the ‘unofficial’ ADP private payrolls report on employment that showed -32,000 private payrolls were lost in November.

The goods sector of the U.S. economy, including Construction and Manufacturing, lost -19,000 jobs. The service sector lost -12,000 overall, though Education, Health and Leisure activities added +46,000 jobs in the sector.

September’s last ‘official’ unemployment report with 119,000 payroll jobs was ok, but that was before the government lock down. And the U.S. economy had averaged just 38,600 new jobs since April and the tariff announcements.

Dr. Nela Richardson Chief Economist, ADP said it best in the survey. Small businesses aren’t hiring because of the uncertain tariffs, since some 90 percent of small businesses import their products that are sold in the U.S.

September retail sales also reported before the shutdown. Retail sales are growing more dependent on a smaller group of consumers. The top 10% of earners in the U.S. accounted for nearly 50% of spending in the second quarter, the highest level it’s been since this data first started being collected in 1989, according to Moody’s Analytics.

And the poor ISM manufacturing index numbers show the manufacturing sector has been contracting for the past nine months.

“A closely followed manufacturing index fell to a four-month low of 48.2% in November from 48.7% in the prior month, the Institute for Supply Management said Monday. Any number below 50% signals contraction,.” MarketWatch

The Federal Reserve will probably lower interest rates another -0.25%, but next year is a rate tossup because of the inflation worries, as almost no tariff agreements have been ratified by congress and signed.

We still have a lot of postponed economic data from the government shutdown, in other words, such as personal consumption and spending data (PCE) that the Fed prefers to measure inflation. We know that annual consumer CPI inflation had jumped to 3% in September, also before the shutdown, and will probably go higher as the tariff costs are passed on to consumers and businesses.

It’s obvious that we are living in uncertain times, and the old Republican playbook of tax cuts combined with DOGE and Project 25 slashing of government benefits are hurting the 90 percent of Americans still living paycheck to paycheck, as I’ve said.

Is that enough to cause a recession, in spite of the stock market’s boost supporting the top 10 percent of Americans that can still afford more than the basic necessities?

It won’t take much to tip US into a recession. The data we need to predict the future will eventually come out. Then we will know if not only the manufacturing sector is contracting—e.g., employment, capital expenditures, and personal income—which are the other major components that determine whether we are in a recession.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Retail Sales Continue Decline

 Financial FAQs

“Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for August 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $732.0 billion, up 0.6 percent (±0.4 percent) from the previous month, and up 5.0 percent (±0.5 percent) from August 2024.” Census.gov

FREDretailsales

The financial markets rallied because the US Census Bureau’s August retail sales report showed consumers were still shopping and might save the holiday season for retailers. But it couldn’t hide the damage from the tariff wars.

The FRED graph of retail sales shows the huge monthly fluctuations in sales due to the tariff uncertainty. January retail sales (i.e., when Trump was sworn in) plunged 1%. In March it rose 1.3% to get ahead of Trump’s April 2 retaliatory tariffs. Then it plunged for two more months before Trump announced the 90-day reprieve, after which it rose 1% before beginning the monthly sales decline to 0.6% in August.

And retail sales are reported without inflation factored in as I highlighted above. Today’s inflation rate is 3% and climbing, so ‘real’ retail sales on average have been increasing just 2%. And this must be in large part because of the decline in the number of shoppers.

The latest unemployment report showed there has been a -313,000 decline year-over-year in the working population mostly thanks to the ICE roundup of undocumented immigrants. Although less than 100,000 undocumented immigrants have been incarcerated by ICE, there are millions more hiding in their homes or elsewhere to avoid being arrested.

Also factor in the job decline from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The economy created half as many new jobs from early 2024 to early 2025 in its national benchmark reassessment of the job market—a loss of -991,000 jobs—amounting to about 71,000 new jobs a month instead of the previously reported 147,000.

This decline will eventually figure into economic growth as well, since consumers power two-thirds of GDP growth.

The financial markets are in a relief rally because the tariffs (i.e., import taxes) aren’t yet stopping consumers from shopping and eating. New car and car parts sales increased in August for the third month in a row. Car shoppers have been buying more vehicles than usual for the past several months to avoid anticipated price increases in the coming months as tariffs take full effect.

Americans have also spent more on certain items that are heavily imported, such as coffee and car parts, whose prices have risen (coffee prices are up 15%, thanks in part to Trump’s 50% tariffs in Brazilian imports).

Another critical category, restaurant sales, advanced 0.7% last month. Overall restaurant spending is up 6.6% in the past three months compared with the same three-month period one year ago.

People buy more prepared food when they are confident in the economy. They eat out less when they are anxious about their jobs, according to MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash, a commentator I like to follow.

Wednesday’s Federal Reserve rate cut could power more consumer spending and higher inflation. Many upper income earners are willing to pay the higher tab, but not the bottom 20 percent of income earners.

And the bottom 20 percenters are in the main Trump supporters. So, I for one hope the Supreme Court disallows many of the tariffs-by-executive order Trump is foisting on the rest of the world. They are counter-productive, since their goal is not really economic. They are tax increases on all Americans to aid in paying down the huge debt incurred from Trump’s gigantic transfer of wealth in his big beautiful tax bill.

So he will use any excuse to levy them. The 50 percent Brazilian tariff is an excellent example, since Brazil imports more from the US than it exports. Trump has said he did it to attempt to influence the outcome of convicted felon buddy Jair Bolsonaro’s trial. It didn’t work, of course, as Bolsonaro is going to jail.

Trump wants to be a dictator, and a major trait of dictators is the accumulation of enormous wealth, not to “lift all boats” as JF Kennedy once said, but their own boats while the rest of US sink.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Who Won the Civil War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Just more than one week after President Donald Trump unveiled plans to deploy troops from the D.C. National Guard and to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle crime in Washington, six states have pledged to send in their own National Guard troops to pitch in with the effort.” Fox News

NYTimes

The civil war isn’t over? The Republican Party, envious of the blue states and a federal government that protect the rights of all Americans, has been attempting to take away as many of those protections as possible since Donald Trump returned to power.

Republicans have attacked such basic freedoms as women’s rights (abortion), immigrants’ rights (birth right citizenship), minorities and the poorest (loss of Medicare, Obamacare benefits) and seniors with cutbacks in social security services.

Trump added fuel to the fire when he said the Charlottesville torch carrying parade in 2017 that chanted racist, Nazi and antisemitic slogans had “very fine people on both sides.”

And since the big ugly tax cut bill was passed, Trump has sent National Guard Troops to Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, cities with black mayors (Chicago and Philadelphia may be next). It’s now obvious the Trump’s Republican Party has become the party of White Nationalist Christians, as if Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a mere blip on the screen of history that Republicans since the Jim Crow era have attempted to erase.

Six red (formerly confederate) states; Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; have also sent a contingent of their National Guard to “police” DC with the mission to aid in fighting crime.

Yet three of those red states—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rank in the top ten states with the highest rates of violent crime. Why aren’t they policing their own cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee that has the highest violent crime rate in the country?

Red States don’t have those services for a reason. Generations of control by Republicans haven’t raised minimum wages, have weakened unions’ right to collective bargaining with right to work laws, and provided fewer health care services or environmental protection.

That’s why the minimum wage in Blue states can be more than twice that of Red states (Washington State is $17/hr versus Texas’ $7.25/hr, the national minimum age). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.

It’s become increasingly clear that Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t want to believe that it lost the civil war.

They have instead chosen to make it a cultural war between the Haves (blue states) and Have-nots (red states) by attacking the human rights and climate protections in blue states that far outclass those in red states and has resulted in the huge economic and cultural divide between them.

Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states produce just 29 percent of our income and wealth, according to the Hartman Report, a progressive podcast. The median family income in Blue states is $74,243 vs. $63,553 in the red states. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.

Donald Trump and his Republican-led red states should be wanting to emulate the best parts of blue states, instead of invading them: such as with better environmental protections, higher incomes, lower poverty rates, crime rates, and better health care above all.

But it might result in citizens of the red states wanting those protections as well, and Republicans losing their hold on power over them.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“The House has now passed what must surely be the worst piece of legislation in modern U.S. history. Millions of Americans are about to see crucial government support snatched away. A significant number will die prematurely due to lack of adequate medical care or nutrition. Yet all this suffering won’t come close to offsetting the giant hole in the budget created by huge tax cuts for the rich. Long-term interest rates have already soared as America loses the last vestiges of its former reputation for fiscal responsibility.” Paul Krugman-Substack

 Graph: Last Tech Age

Budget analysts have been saying (almost unanimously) that it will increase our federal debt by as much as $4trillion and raise the federal debt level to as much as 130 percent of GDP, further endangering the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. Government.

In passing their ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ (BBB) by just one vote, Republicans will worsen the income inequality and partisan divide that has picked ordinary Americans’ pocketbooks since the 1980s and President Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ economic policies.

The BBB will essentially renew the Trump administrations first term Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJB), that gave even more tax breaks to the wealthiest—to Trump and his oligarchs.

The U.S. Is already in 106th place of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook, I said in 2017; with a Gini inequality index that ranks it with developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings; Germany and France are ranked 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poor citizens of a country.

So how much worse can it get before MAGA followers realize Trump has never meant to fulfill the “Day 1” promises of lower inflation, more good paying jobs, and a Ukraine peace deal?

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gave the most digestible breakdown of the TCJA effects, if it passes the Senate as well:

· Giving the biggest benefits to the wealthy. Households with incomes in the top 5 percent, who have incomes over around $320,000, would receive roughly half of the benefits of extending the expiring tax cuts.

· Ballooning the deficit. Along with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush, the 2017 law has severely eroded our nation’s revenue base. The House budget would compound the damage, adding hundreds of billions of dollars to deficits each year. Extending the 2017 tax cuts would cost $3.6 trillion through 2034.

· Failing to significantly boost economic growth, workers’ earnings, or other benefits for workers. The trickle-down benefits that proponents claimed the 2017 law would produce never materialized, and the law hasn’t come close to paying for itself. Yet the House budget claims that extending the tax cuts would generate trillions in revenue — far more than any independent estimate.

Our ranking of the worst income inequality among developed countries is bound to influence U.S. voters once the Trump’s higher import taxes take hold as well, and stagflation returns.

Even worse is the effect the BBB will have to our credit rating. Will it continue to decline? That is really what Paul Krugman is most worried about. It’s the worst kind of fiscal responsibility. Why such a blatant and foolish attempt to make the rich richer and working Americans poorer? Republicans aren’t even attempting to hide it anymore.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

A Place of Tolerance and Understanding

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“I believe our political divide can be repaired. But our leaders must act with moral clarity and take their cues from the good people of this nation, who in times of tragedy always seem to find our better angels.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote the above appeal just days after an arsonist invaded and attempted to burn down the Governor’s residence. Governor Shapiro attributed the attack to “the political division and violence in America today.”

He also gave thanks for the good people, whose “…prayers, blessings and messages of support we’ve received have lifted us up and shown us the way forward in the wake of a traumatic event.”

How do we find the “better angels” of our nature; was there a time when Americans were less partisan, more united in purpose?

There are many explanations and explainers of the political divide that led to red states vs. blue states and Donald Trump’s re-election. A major economic reason was the migration of many manufacturing jobs overseas, and politics shifting to the right after the stagflation of the 1970s while Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve raised the Fed Funds rate to 20 percent, causing several recessions .

The loss of manufacturing jobs resulted in a very angry rust-belt populace and a huge surge in drug use and suicides among white males living there that was first documented in the best-selling Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, Ann Case.

The result is the share of Americans still living middle class lives in 2023 has shrunk to 51 percent from 61 percent in 1971 due to the loss of those jobs as well as Republican legislatures and the Supreme Court limiting labor unions’ collective bargaining power to replace them.

PEW

The loss of incomes and jobs led to the current economic divide, GW Bush’s war on drugs and the highest incarceration rate in the world. The hollowed out American middle class became a predominantly consumer society living on cheaper imports mostly employed in lower paying service sector jobs, whether as professionals in high tech or recreation and leisure activities.

Best-selling author Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community attributed the growing political divide to the consequent breakup of communities as they moved away from their birthplace or original communities in search of better jobs.

Whereas our neighbor Canada with a similar population mix had greater income equality by maintaining a predominately middle-class society, in part because it had strong labor unions. A 2023 Pollara survey of 3,000 Canadians 18 and older found that a much larger 78 per cent of Canadians consider themselves middle class, including 39 per cent of those earning less than $20,000, and 92 per cent of those earning more than $150,000.

Australia with a similar population mix is also considered a much more egalitarian society. Approximately 56 percent of the population self-identify as middle class, while 43 percent identify as working class and 1.4 percent as upper class. Other surveys suggest that around 58 percent of the population is in the middle-income class. The HILDA survey indicates that a significant portion, roughly 80 percent, of Australians are classified as middle class based on one measure.

Just the fact that most of their inhabitants considered themselves in the middle-class contributed to their sense of wellbeing.

We can also begin to restore our sense of wellbeing by growing our middle class once again with a simple but profound change—heeding Governor Shapiro’s appeal to find political leaders who will work to raise the national minimum wage above $7.25 per hour that was last raised in 2009.

Many of the poorest red states in the south and Midwest rust belt don’t even have a minimum wage, so they must adhere to our national minimum wage. Yet we know blue states such as California and New York have raised their minimum wage above $15 per hour, attracting a more creative and productive work force.

Working towards greater income equality that other developed countries have maintained with a strong middle class would help to bring Americans together again.

“William Penn founded our commonwealth as a place where all would be welcome — a place of tolerance and understanding where people of different faiths could live together in peace,” said Shapiro.

Where better to find such a leader who will take his cues from the good people and listen to our better angels than the Governor of Pennsylvania, in the original home of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Too Dumb To Fail?

 Financial FAQs

“Anyway, at this point we should assume that the same combination of incompetence and bad intentions that afflicts national security and budget policy applies to everything the Trump administration touches. Incredibly, quite a few investors and journalists still believe that there’s deep thinking underlying the administration’s trade and currency policy. I guarantee you, there isn’t” Paul Krugman Substack

Amazon

I would expand Nobel Laureate Krugman’s surmise of why the Trump administration keeps showing their incompetence and bad intentions not only in national security and budget policy. but outright governance—details of the secret Houthi battle plan leaked to the media beforehand, their latest faux pas.

Such incompetence comes from a history of dumbing down the Republican Party itself, a history that spans decades and includes denying the theory of evolution, climate change, scientific knowledge and common sense thinking in general.

Matt Lewis, Daily Beast columnist, in his book, Too Dumb to Fail, said this in 2016:

“This is the dirty little secret of the conservative movement in America today: everyone knows that it has lost its intellectual bearings. Empty-headed talking point reciters, rookie politicians who’ve never managed anything in their lives, media clowns such as Donald Trump, dim bulbs in tight pants or short skirts, professionally outraged shout-fest talking heads, and total political neophytes dominate conservative airwaves and the Right’s political discourse.”

Republicans’ incompetence has allowed an autocrat and con artist like Donald Trump to come to power to their own detriment. He is not at all concerned about their agenda, just his own—whether it is invading Greenland or the Panama Canal, attempting to impoverish Canadians so they will give in to his tariff blackmail, or backing out of NATO to please Vladimir Putin,

Republicans’ ‘empty headedness’ shows when they allow Trump/Musk to dumb down their own constituents by shutting down the Department of Education that supports 80 percent of American students in public education. This will harm Republicans’ red states citizens the most. Nine of the lowest ten states ranked on national education scores are red states, according to Wallet Hub.

Such ignorance breeds conspiracy theories, rumors, and feeds an entire propaganda machine to keep certain voters in line that polls show are the least informed politically.

President Trump lied some 30,573, or 21 times a day during his first term, according to a recent NYTimes article. A con artist must lie to cover up and justify earlier lies, whereas a truth-teller doesn’t have to lie or change his or her story. This is basic common-sense thinking, of course, something anyone can understand, if they choose to.

Donald Trump dazzled Republicans so much so that they allowed him to choose the least-qualified candidates to run his government and carry out their agenda of deregulation, tax cuts and tariffs—so he would maintain the disinformation campaign that supports the red meat issues conservatives have always wanted in some form or another—cutting taxes in order to downsize parts of the government that protect the public sector rather than the pockets of the wealthiest.

Tax cuts always sound good to those who don’t believe in the public good of better healthcare, market rules that punish cheaters, and laws that protect the environment.

Dumbing down their electorate makes it easier for MAGA Republicans to lie about issues that require some degree of education and understanding, but it will ultimately come back to bite them. Trump and Republicans are not only harming their red states, but now the whole country with their cuts in social security and national security agencies that protect our military secrets.

So can Trump deliver what Republicans want? I believe as Paul Krugman does—"we can assume that the same combination of incompetence and bad intentions that afflicts national security and budget policy applies to everything the Trump administration touches.”

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Was Inflation the Problem?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The West Wing may believe Bidenomics is working because the macroeconomic gurus at the Federal Reserve are telling the White House it’s working. But Bidenomics has failed to create sufficient tangible improvement in the lives of most voters in a world in which groceries still cost more than they did a year ago, average rent and mortgage rates have spiked and health and child care grow ever more unaffordable. Mr. Biden cannot win in 2024 unless he speaks to the economy as it is, not as he wishes it was,”Karen Petrou, NYTimes.

FREDcpi

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in November, after rising 0.2 percent in each of the previous 4 months, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 2.7 percent before seasonal adjustment.

As shown in the FRED cpi graph dating from 2000, the last inflation surge began in 2020 during the Biden administration and the COVID-19 pandemic. A majority of voters in the presidential election decided prices and inflation had been too high for too long, therefore President Biden was blamed for it.

But no, it was the pandemic’s sudden supply shortages that caused the surge, not Biden’s Bidenomics’ legislation that enabled the quickest recovery in the developed world. Yet it took 3.5 years for inflation to return to today’s 2.7 percent annual rate, still above the Fed’s 2 percent target goal.

There was another reason for the anger over such high and prolonged inflation. The incomes of half of U.S. households could not keep up with the inflation surge. Most of the increase in household income was achieved in the period from 1970 to 2000. In these three decades, the median income increased by 41%, to $70,800, at an annual average rate of 1.2%, says PEW Research.

The warning shot about the discontent of American workers was written in 2023 by Karen Petrou, a NYTimes guest columnist, in which she said that “ 64 percent of households live paycheck to paycheck from time to time, according to a March consumer survey. These families are barely making it through the week, let alone accumulating the wealth essential for financial resilience and, over time, financial security.’

Why such an increase in income inequality? A series of recessions (gray bars in the FRED graph) occurred during tempestuous times—the Gulf War, the various wars on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, and busted housing bubble.

The median household income in 2015 – $70,200 – was no higher than its level in 2000, marking a 15-year period of stagnation, an episode of unprecedented duration in the past five decades.

The unemployment rate rose from 4.2 percent to 5.7 percent during the shorter-lived 2001 recession (and 9/11 Twin-towers attack). It rose from 5 percent to 10 percent during the Great Recession that ended in 2009. And those in the lower ‘income brackets suffered the most financial damage, as is always the case.

And the reason for those recessions was in large part because “it is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” again quoting Roosevelt’s Federal Reserve Chairman at the time.

Ms. Petrou concluded, “Listening to advisers — not voters — is a fatal campaign error, one that Hillary Clinton made in 2016. Mr. Biden only narrowly pulled out a win in 2020 because Mr. Trump wasn’t listening to voters when it came to Covid. Now they’re tuned in to Mr. Trump’s perspective on the economy because he is, in his way, listening to them.”

The irony is that it is just those Bidenomics’ programs that are funding factories in many of the red states that can help to ease the inequality that has affected so many working folk, and that is the source of most of the discontent.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green 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

Trumponomics 2.0--What To Expect?

 Financial FAQs

George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s incoherence 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 result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”

This was a leading conservative writer’s prediction of what did happen in President Trump’s first term as President—chaos. Trump’s second term should be a rerun if he succeeds in getting most of his initial cabinet picks confirmed by (or rammed through) the U.S. Senate.

Huffington Post

Many have no qualifications for those jobs, just as in Trump’s first term when most were lobbyists with blatant conflicts of interest, which resulted in many having to resign when their corruption was uncovered. Such dysfunctional behavior was a reason President Trump lost the House of Representatives 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 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.

A 2016 USA TODAY article catalogued more than 3,500 lawsuits filed by or against Donald Trump over his business career. Many were filed by small businesspeople and firms that Trump refused to pay for work done on his various real estate holdings.

“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But the USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades -- and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump, or his companies have refused to pay them."

The Friel's family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward's father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort's builder, said USA TODAY.

Edward's son, Paul, who was the firm's accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. "That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company... which has been around since my grandfather," he said.

I wrote then, “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 will 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 inequality. They found that income inequality rose substantially between 1979 and 2002 because the top 10 percent of the income distribution took 91 percent of the income growth during that period. As the real incomes of the top 10 percent soared, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent stagnated..

With nothing to replace the economic destruction that will follow Trump’s policies, other than the “Drill baby Drill” for more fossil fuels, we will be poorer with predictions for an additional $5 trillion added to the national debt. As in his first term, I do not foresee a happy two years ahead, at the least.

It turns out very few of us need a tax cut. MarketWatch economist Rex Nutting calculated that those in the 60 percent middle-income brackets—from $32,000 to $140,000 per year—pay just an average 2.5 percent in income taxes. It’s only the richest 0.1 to 1 percent income earners that pay more, and so want the huge tax cuts congress and the Trump administration are proposing.

“A bill that cuts federal income taxes for middle-class families makes absolutely no sense, except as a sad way of camouflaging the real intent of the bill: Giving millions of dollars to the very wealthy, who happen to be the only people who are really benefiting from our uneven economic growth,” said Nutting.

It was Trump and his family that profited most from his first term in retaining ownership of his assets rather than either divesting or putting them in a blind trust, blatantly ignoring the emoluments clause of the constitution that forbid profiting from foreign governments seeking his favor.

Donald Trump suffered no consequences for his lawless behavior as has former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is banned from running again until 2030 for casting doubt on Brazil’s 2022 election outcome that voted him out of office.

The greatest chaos may come from his pick of Pam Bondi for Attorney General, who is replacing Matt Gaetz. She has sworn revenge for perceived weaponization of the Justice Department by weaponizing it even more to persecute his perceived enemies.

“When will the 2017 nightmare end?” I wrote in 2017. “Maybe in 2018, if most Americans realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is not theirs. Americans desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is available to all, not just the few.”

That is what happened in Trump’s first term. Must it get even worse before it gets better?

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Why the Inflation Problem?

 Financial FAQs

Most of us remember when a gallon of gas was less the $2, or a quart of milk less than $1, or housing was last affordable in the 1970s. I remember the inflation surges in housing. What happened?

Shouldn’t we as voters understand inflation if a majority of voters were so angry about the soaring price of everything that the majority would find somebody to blame (President Biden), and elect somebody else (Donald Trump) who said he will make everything better, even though that didn’t happen during his first term?

It is a peculiar form of American amnesia that caused so many to vote against their own interests—in this case a majority of white women to vote for a sexual predator and abortion opponent, young working class males to support a con-artist who had stiffed or defrauded his own workers and filed bankruptcy multiple times to avoid paying them.

It has to be because everything is happening too fast in our high-Tech driven economy and culture (Internet?) that has left so many people still wanting to live in a world they remember or imagine.

This happened at least once before and signaled how difficult it is for Americans to face forward rather than look backward to a time that never was, even though they crave change. It was first noticed in Thomas Frank’s 2005 best-seller: What’s the Matter With Kansas; How Conservatives Won the Heart of American?

Such nostalgia enabled GW Bush to win a second term, although he started his wars on terror by lying about weapons of mass destruction after failing to anticipate 9/11.

To understand what happened with Trump’s false economic narrative—that Americans were better off financially in his first term—we should understand the complexity of our own economy.

The main priority of Republicans—tax cuts that Bush and Trump Republicans enacted were a giant scam that actually transferred more wealth to their supporters and imp0verished more working Americans, while adding $trillions to the national debt.

But enough Americans remembered an earlier, whiter America that had experienced a victorious, post-World War Two prosperity—until the 1970s and school integration, minorities wanting more rights (including women), the killings of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and a Vietnam War tore our country apart.

It’s hard to imagine such a tumultuous history today several generations later.

Republicans have always favored tax cuts that enriched themselves, but not better healthcare for Americans—especially women and children.

CBPP.org

So how should voters understand the American economy? Firstly, we have been living in what has been called the second Gilded Age that has favored the wealthiest since the 1970s, and not ordinary workers whose household incomes have stagnated since then.

But most Americans probably understand it’s most basic tenet: The Law of Supply and Demand. It’s an economic term, but based on commone sense. The price of things depends on the supply of things. And when there is an abrupt shortage, such as oil and gas because of the Arab oil embargo that cut off OPEC (The Organization of Oil Exporting Countries) oil imports in the 1970s, gas prices soared. And that began the upward cycle of price fluctuations.

Meanwhile, more than 80 million baby boomers became consumers at the same time who wanted more of everything. And the housing industry couldn’t build enough dwellings to satisfy the increased demand.

This is as good a common sense explanation as any to understand inflation. Prices go up or down when they aren’t in equilibrium—i.e., too much supply lowers prices, while too much demand from consumers and businesses raises them.

The same thing happened with the COVID-19 pandemic that killed one million Americans. The worldwide shutdowns and shelter-in-place requirements to keep it from spreading caused massive shortages of everything, which caused the price hikes that infuriated so many.

Consumers couldn’t very well blame COVID-19, a virus like the flu though much more virulent, but they could blame who was supposed to protect Americans from it.

What is most remarkable is that prices had been rising rapidly since the 1970s, but Americans hadn’t reacted as angrily as they did after the COVID-19 pandemic—maybe because of the trauma from so many lives lost—whole families in some cases.

Inflation is like the frog in water that has been slowly coming to a boil. For whatever reason, we have only noticed it since the water (meaning our economy) has come to a boil from the pandemic’s aftereffects that have most hurt our working class, many of whom had lost jobs as globalization moved good paying manufacturing jobs overseas in the name of making everything cheaper.

Most of us remember when a gallon of gas was less the $2, or a quart of milk less than $1, or housing prices were last affordable in the 1970s, as I said. But there was no quick cure. The OPEC oil embargo jump-started the decade-long inflation surge in the 1970s, for instance.

What can be done to cure the current inflation surge? Republicans and Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” promise can’t do much to lower oil prices because the U.S. already produces more oil than it uses, while adding more CO2 to the atmosphere that is accelerating global warming, that endangers whole parts of the country.

And higher proposed tariffs won’t increase the supply of anything and might lower demand, since it makes imports more expensive because it is a tax on imported goods.

There are two solutions that the Biden administration have implemented, but Republicans don’t like—federal funds to make construction of affordable housing cheaper, and the elimination of loopholes that encourage the profit-taking by cartel-size pharmaceutical corporations that took advantage of the pandemic shortages and continue to raise their prices.

And lastly, we need more comprehensive healthcare legislation that would increase productivity of our workforce because they become healthier. But Republicans have historically opposed that as well, having attempted to repeal Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, more than 30 times. It is the only private health insurance that insures more than 30 million Americans against preexisting conditions.

Republicans are even talking about downsizing Medicaid and Medicare in the name of increasing efficiency. That will also increase inflation, because M & M keep overall costs of healthcare lower with their power to control treatment and drug prices.

So it’s difficult to know if it was ideology and conspiracy theories triumphing common sense economics that enabled Republicans to win this election.

Inflation has returned to its historic norm, and the American economy is fully employed so everyone’s job is safe. Many voters want someone to blame for their myriad anxieties, as Kansans had done two decades earlier.

We will now have to worry if this Gilded Age will end as did the last one. So much wealth had been accumulated in too few hands that it caused the Great Depression and led to World War Two.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

How Much Do We Care?

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.”

NPR.org

This is a question I asked in 2017. What country had the second-highest mortality from noncommunicable conditions — like diabetes, heart disease or violence — and the fourth highest from infectious disease? Also, from adolescence to adulthood to old age, what country has the highest chance of dying an early death?

The answer is the United States of America. Where else, since the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal health care? Then why would Donald Trump nominate RFK, Jr., an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy follower with no medical background who is the least qualified person for guarding the health of Americans as Secretary of Health and Human Services?

Timothy Snyder said it best in looking at Trump’s cabinet picks to date:

“Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

“The foundation of modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population.  We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments.  We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose.  Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. 

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.”

The Republican Party itself has been on the same path with their efforts to dismantle healthcare legislation such as Obamacare in the name of downsizing government.

A recent New York Times Business Insider article by Eduardo Porter highlighted a recent study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of 16 of the richest countries in the world that set out to assess our nation’s health.

The results are devastating and show how far America has fallen behind in caring for its citizens.

This problem should have nothing to do with ideology, and whether access to affordable health care should be a privilege or a right. Too many Americans are dying of drug overdose and violence. Too many Americans suffer from depression, a major cause of drug abuse.

And too many Americans are obese, making them less productive and more prone to accidents in the workplace. “The United States ranks in the bottom fourth among the 30 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of days lost to disability,” says Porter. “Women will lose 362 days between birth and their 60th birthday: men about 336. Mental health problems like depression will account for most.”

But these statistics hide the real problem—rampant income inequality that has caused many of these unhealthy ouitcomes.

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. Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

And the poorer the person, family, or community, the more prone to illness and drug use is that person, or family, or community. This is where the just defeated Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare bill would have hurt the most—in the poorer red states that voted for President Trump.

“What’s more, the United States’ higher tolerance of poverty undoubtedly contributes to higher rates of sickness and death,” says Porter. “Americans at all socioeconomic levels are less healthy than people in some other rich countries. But the disparity is greatest among low-income groups.”

Finally contributing to our health crisis is the incredible amount of violence—both due to guns (33,000 per year killed by guns), workplace accidents, and drug abuse, that a universal health care system would treat via mental health coverages as well.

In other words, there are much higher costs because we don’t have a healthy healthcare system and we the citizens are paying those costs.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Harris Presidency

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

What would it mean for Kamala Harris to be our first female President? It’s a historical turning point that affirms women have finally attained equal political rights to men, and American citizens s confirm they want greater personal rights—to expanded health care, abortion, and environment protection that has been held back by a dominant male culture until now.

Should Harris and the Democrats win it would also signal the end of the Second Gilded Age, an age characterized by record income inequality that began in earnest when President Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies began to transfer massive amounts of wealth from working adults (small business and salaried) to the owners of wealth (capital assets) in the 1980s.

cbpp.org

It would give President-Elect Harris a mandate to begin to reverse the tax structures that were the major cause of the record inequality by raising corporate and personal tax rates back to Reagan-era levels, and thus begin to reduce the massive budget deficits that resulted.

President Reagan and Republicans cut the maximum personal tax rate for the wealthiest from 50 percent to 28 percent and reduced corporate taxes from 34 to 28 percent to initiate what economists call the Second Gilded Age, which resulted in our first massive deficit--$400 billion—by the end of his administration.

The massive deficits continued to grow under successive Republican administration tax cuts that resulted in curtailing our social safety net. GW Bush’s deficit grew to $1 trillion, and the Trump administration’s to more than $5 trillion.

A Harris Presidency could also mean an end to our ongoing civil war, a war originally between the industrial North vs. slave-holding South that never really ended with General Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Though slave-owning was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln’s north winning the civil war, southern states found ways to continue to impoverish former slaves by terrorizing them under Jim Crow laws that even the civil rights acts of the 1960s couldn’t completely eradicate.

Today’s manifestation of our civil war has morphed into a battle between red states controlled by Republicans with a white male/Oligarchic culture continuing to impoverish their own citizens vs. more prosperous blue states with a dominant female/minority majority.

Kamala Harris has promised in her platform and speeches that she would be a President for all Americans. That would mean policies benefiting red state citizens as well, such as raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 that was last raised in 2009.

Currently 14 states haven’t raised their minimum wage since then, or at all. Five red states have not even adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour, so that in all seven of these states, the federal minimum wage guarantees at least a $7.25 per hour wage. New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are the only blue states still with the federal minimum wage.

There are other ways the red states have kept workers’ salaries lower that Harris should remedy: lobby to repeal so-called right-to-work laws in 26 states that say members of a union aren’t required to pay union dues even though they enjoy the benefits. The result is that membership in unions has declined, along with workers’ rights to bargain collectively. And those 26 states now have a Supreme Court majority to enforce those state laws.

Democratic majorities have always found ways to benefit more Americans since the New Deal. President Obama was able to pass Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, the first universal health insurance that meant insurance companies couldn’t ban clients with existing conditions.

Climate change has become a clear and present danger causing more hurricanes, floods, wildfires threatening Americans that Donald Trump has called a hoax, and would rather “Drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has already begun work on reducing global warming with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidizing alternative energy sources that don’t increase global warming but that the Republican Party vociferously opposes to protect its fossil fuel constituents.

We have lived through a Gilded Age before. The first Gilded Age came in the late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution made Robber Barons such as railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, banking titan JP Morgan, and Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller the richest men in their time.

It ended with the death of President William McKinley in 1901, and revelations of rampant corruption followed by Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that created government institutions such as the Federal Reserve to regulate banking and social security, as well as empowering labor unions to level the playing field for workers.

If elected, Kamala Harris and Democrats should be able to continue the new New Deal legislation that President Biden’s Bidenomics’ policies have initiated with more than $5 trillion invested in keeping America great and creating 16 million jobs that have benefited all of our citizens, not just Oligarchs such an Elon Musk.

Musk warned, after all, what would happen if he became the efficiency czar Trump says he wants him to be and cuts $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. There would be no money left for social programs, the military, and drastic cuts in social security and Medicare benefits, say economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

It would also mean Husband Doug Emhoff would become the first, First Gentleman, which wouldn’t diminish the historical record of great First Ladies. Men should take heart that women have equaled men in all ways, not just in intelligence and courage, but have shown a heart large enough to create a United States, not a Divided States of America, when Kamala Harris becomes our new President.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Bidenomics Is Working!

 Financial FAQs

Brad Delong

Why are Republicans denigrating Biodenomics, the economic policies passed by a bipartisan congress since 2021 that is causing 3 percent GDP growth and 4.0 percent unemployment, with 8 million job vacancies looking for workers, and inflation back to COVID-19 pre-pandemic levels?

Republicans are playing politics in this election year, of course, but Senator McConnell has touted President Biden for rebuilding some major bridges in Kentucky with the Infrastructure Act.

In fact, the U.S. has far outdistanced other developed countries in recovering from the COVID-19. Why? Because President Biden has pulled off a great renaissance of public-private investments with said bipartisan congress, the largest investments in renewing the U.S. economy since Roosevelt pulled off the New Deal during the Great Depression..

Time Magazine described what it is meant to do: “Bidenomics argues that a large and thriving middle class is the primary cause of economic growth. “When the middle class does well, everybody does well,” the President has repeatedly explained. This is the core proposition of Bidenomics: that prosperity grows from the bottom up and the middle out.”

Vice President Harris has echoed that slogan in her campaign, because very few Americans seem to understand Bidenomics at all. A major reason is that four decades of its predecessor; Reaganomics, or Trickle-down economic policies; have badly damaged the middle class, followed by the double-whammy of COVID-19,

A Monmouth University Poll finds that just under half the public gives President Joe Biden credit for this upturn, for instance, but few say his policies are helping the middle class, especially compared to his predecessor.

“The president has been touting ‘Bidenomics,’ but the needle of public opinion has not really moved. Americans are just not giving him a lot of credit when it comes to the economy,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The poll also finds that disapproval of Congress has hit a nominal record for the past decade.

Time Magazine cites a major reason for the pessimism in a new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation—the record inequality of the past four decades:

“…had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. “

The authors assert that since the 1970s, some $50 trillion in wealth has been transferred from workers to owners of capital with the massive deregulation of whole industries, including banking, the passing of anti-labor legislation that weakened union collective bargaining, and massive tax cuts for the wealthiest that practically halved the maximum income tax rate from 50 percent in 1980 to 28 percent today.

So, it is no wonder that workers in the Rust Belt Midwest want to return to the ‘good old days’ of post WWII, when income distribution was more equal (but with fewer Black and women’s rights)?

The problem is that has never been Republicans’ agenda, especially MAGA Republicans, still the party of the wealthy attempting to sell their credo that lower taxes and fewer government benefits will benefit all Americans.

Europeans love Bidenomics, however. “With a fast-growing economy, a strong labour market and falling inflation, the US has outpaced its counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, says a recent BBC article. That put the US at 2.5% over the course of the year, outpacing all other advanced economies and on track to do so again in 2024.”

What will it take for Americans to know and value what we have?

Harlan Green © 2024

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