How Trump helps the rich and hurts everyone else (Uncut) 03-26-2025

Class war: How Trump helps the rich and hurts everyone else

When Donald Trump campaigned to be U.S. president in 2024, he promised to help working-class Americans. Trump even went to a McDonald’s, and he pretended to be a fast food worker. This is not a normal situation, is it, huh? What a good-looking family.

How did you produce those good-looking kids? And he promised, quote, when I’m president, the McDonald’s ice cream machines will work great again, end quote. That is not a joke. He posted that on his official verified Instagram account.

But when he actually became president, Donald Trump made it clear that his policies would be serving the rich, not poor and working-class Americans. Trump himself is a billionaire, so that’s not surprising. But he appointed 13 billionaires to be top-level officials in his administration.

This means that the Trump administration represents not just the 1% that is the richest Americans, but the 0.0001%, which is what billionaires are in terms of the U.S. population. And the collective net worth of Trump’s top appointees as of January was more than $460 billion, including Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at that time in January had more than $400 billion in wealth, although his wealth fell quite a bit by March as there were boycotts of companies like Tesla around the world in protest of Musk and Trump. All U.S. government administrations represent the interests of billionaire elites, but Donald Trump has made it as clear as day.

He invited the world’s richest and most powerful billionaire oligarchs to his inauguration, and the CEOs of these massive big tech corporations in Silicon Valley were sitting with his cabinet members, which was very symbolic. Then just a few hours after he took office, Trump invited three more billionaire oligarchs to the White House to do a press conference about AI. And as president, Trump has been having regular phone calls with some of his billionaire clients, including the billionaire CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, and it has a direct link to Trump. And he has phone calls with the CEO of BlackRock, and they talk about plans, like for instance, BlackRock bought the two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Meanwhile, Trump has been passing a series of policies through executive order that have benefited rich elites, including he gutted an anti-money laundering law, which essentially gives a green light to money laundering.

Trump also ended the enforcement of a U.S. law that banned bribery, essentially giving a green light to bribery as well. In his executive order, Trump boasted that allowing bribery will help, quote, America and its companies gain strategic commercial advantages around the world, end quote. And he told reporters that by allowing bribery, quote, it’s going to mean a lot more business for America, end quote.

Speaking of corruption, just a few days before Trump returned to the White House, he launched a meme coin named after himself. It’s called Trump Coin. Reuters reported that entities behind Trump’s crypto coin accumulated close to $100 million in trading fees in just two weeks, while tens of thousands of small traders lost money.

Trump launched the meme coin on the 17th of January, just three days before his inauguration. And essentially, it was a pump and dump scheme. The value quickly rose and then it fell by two thirds in what’s known as a rug pull.

And what’s so ironic about this is that Trump was essentially exploiting his own supporters. There are reports that at least 810,000 people lost money while Trump coin insiders made $100 million in two weeks. And many Trump supporters were angry about this because they thought that they would get rich by investing in Trump’s meme coin, but they actually lost most of their money.

But honestly, all of this was pretty much predictable because Trump is essentially following the same playbook that he followed during his first term. In fact, in 2017, Donald Trump cut taxes on the rich and on corporations. And as of 2018, billionaires in the U.S. paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of working class and poor Americans.

Trump has pledged to extend those tax breaks and cut taxes on the rich even more. And economists at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the people in the U.S. who will see the highest increase in taxes are the poor and the working class, whereas the rich will have their taxes cut. They estimated that the richest 5% of the U.S. population will see their taxes reduced by 1.2%, whereas the poorest 20% will see their taxes increased by 4.8%. And why is this? It’s because Trump is massively expanding tariffs.

And what are tariffs? Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, which is essentially a tax on consumption, because the U.S. imports many goods from China and Mexico and Canada and other countries. And working class and poor people spend a much higher percentage of their paycheck on consumer goods and food and basic necessities than rich people. I mean, if you have billions of dollars, you’re not going to buy a lot more food because suddenly you have billions of dollars.

Whereas if you are a working class person and you’re barely making ends meet, a lot of your paycheck goes to paying for food and clothes and other basic necessities. And a lot of those are imported and you’re going to have to pay more because of the tariffs. So in other words, Trump is essentially increasing taxes on the working class and cutting taxes on the rich.

It is a wealth transfer from the majority of working class people to the minority of rich people. And these economists estimated that the average rich person in the 1% of the elite Americans, they will see their taxes reduced by $36,000, whereas the bottom 95% of Americans will have their taxes increase and the middle class will bear the largest burden in terms of the increase in taxes. Now, some Trump supporters may be skeptical and they would criticize that study saying that it’s a hypothetical projection of what Trump will do.

So let’s look at the effects of Trump’s first term when he cut taxes in 2017 on the rich. This is according to data that already exists. This is not a hypothetical projection into the future.

Economists found that because of Trump’s 2017 tax law, the richest 1% of Americans saw their taxes reduced by $61,000 and the poorest 20% of Americans saw their taxes reduced by $70. So Trump often claims when he was president the first time he cut taxes on all Americans, including poor and working class Americans. It’s not technically wrong, but I mean, come on.

He reduced taxes on the poorest Americans by $70. He reduced taxes on the middle class by $900, but he reduced taxes on the rich by $61,000. There’s no comparison.

But again, Trump supporters may say, well, that’s because rich people make much more money than poor people. Okay, well, let’s look at percentages, not just the overall sum. If you look at the percentage in increase in after-tax income for the richest 5% of Americans, it increased by around 3%, whereas the poorest 20% of Americans saw their after-tax increase by 0.4%. And middle class Americans saw their after-tax income increase by about 1.4%. So once again, Trump’s policies benefited the rich.

The anti-poverty organization Oxfam published a report in 2025 that found that billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers because the U.S. tax code favors income from wealth, that is from capital gains from owning assets, rather than income from work, and also because rich people have loopholes they can find in these laws. They pay a lot of lawyers a lot of money for tax avoidance strategies. And in 2024, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion over the year, or $3.9 billion per day.

And according to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2%, whereas the average American taxpayer in 2021 paid 13%. Meanwhile, the richest 25 Americans, just 25 people, not percent, the richest 25 individuals in the U.S. paid $13.6 billion in taxes over five years from 2014 to 2018, which means that the real tax rate they paid was just about 3.4%. So we’re talking about the taxes that are written in law. Those are not really the actual taxes paid by the rich because they find so many ways to get around those taxes through loopholes.

Now, Trump and his billionaire friends and allies constantly complain that taxes are supposedly too high, which is why they want to cut them further. But this is simply not true historically. If you look at the highest marginal income tax throughout U.S. history, you can see that in the 1940s, the rate was 94%.

And in the 1950s and early 60s, the richest Americans paid an income tax rate of 91%. And even throughout the 1970s, it was still around 70%. It was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s who massively slashed taxes on the rich.

And there was a slight increase after Reagan. But when Trump entered the White House in 2017, he slashed taxes on the rich and the highest marginal income tax rate fell to 37%. Again, compare that to 91% in the 1950s and the early 1960s, which, you know, we’re told is the great golden era of American capitalism when, you know, you had a strong middle class and a strong safety net.

Well, that’s because the rich paid much, much, much higher taxes then. And it’s also, by the way, because there were significant capital controls at that time. And the financial system was very heavily regulated.

And the U.S. was a very manufacturing-oriented economy. Since then, under Reagan and then under Bill Clinton, this was bipartisan, the financial sector was deregulated and the U.S. economy was financialized and deindustrialized. And today we’re living with the consequences of that.

And it’s not just taxes on rich individuals that have been slashed, but also taxes on corporations. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the corporate tax rate was around 50%. Again, this is the golden era of U.S. capitalism in the time where you had a very strong middle class.

Well, what happened after that? After Reagan, the corporate tax rate was slashed to 35%. And then in Trump’s first term, he dropped it to 21%. And now Trump wants to cut it even further.

And in terms of the revenue that the U.S. government has been receiving from corporate taxes, it has been falling as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s. In the 1950s, corporate taxes represented more than 5% of GDP. By the 1960s, it had fallen to around 3.5%. By the 1970s, it fell to around 2.7%. And then with Ronald Reagan, it fell to under 2%.

And today, it’s around 1.6% of GDP. And by the way, if the U.S. government actually closed those loopholes and enforced taxes on the rich and increased taxes, not only income tax on the rich, but also more wealth taxes, including capital gains taxes on the rich, which is where most of their wealth comes from, the U.S. government could potentially reduce taxes on poor and working class Americans. And it could have an actual progressive tax.

You know, we’re told that supposedly, the U.S. tax system is a progressive tax on paper. But it’s not in practice a progressive tax, because the richest billionaires in the country are paying a lower tax rate than average working people. It should be the exact opposite.

The tax burden should be much higher on the rich, and it should be lower on poor and working class people. And that would also help to increase economic growth because it would lead to an increase in aggregate demand, because lower income people will spend more as they get more income. This is something known as the marginal propensity to consume.

If you’re already a billionaire and you get another billion dollars, you’re not going to buy much more. I mean, you’re already super rich. For you, it’s just another drop in the bucket.

But if you’re struggling to make ends meet and then your income tax is reduced and you have more disposable income, you’re going to spend more in the economy, which will help to grow the economy, which will create more jobs so other people can have paychecks and they can spend into the economy. It’s the opposite of the myth of Reaganomics that says, you know, cut all taxes on the rich and they will invest in economic growth. In reality, what we’ve seen is that they invest in buying up existing companies through private equity.

They buy up all of the real estate. So the cost of housing skyrockets. Most of the time, that extra capital that is not being taxed does not go into productive investments.

It goes into financial speculation, which only increases the overhead of the economy. So in other words, I think that the U.S. tax system needs to be fundamentally restructured, but in the opposite of the way that the Trump administration is doing it, which is increasing taxes on the poor and working class and reducing taxes on the rich. It should be the exact opposite.

So I’ve already made it clear how Donald Trump’s policies benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of the population. And this is really significant because the reason that Trump even won the election in 2024 in the first place is because of the economy, because Trump claimed that he was going to help working class Americans. And polls found that a majority of voters said that the economy was the most important issue in the 2024 election.

And this was a trend that we saw around the world, not just in the U.S. During the pandemic, there were many disruptions to the global supply chain, which caused a lot of inflation. And the result was that many incumbent governments and parties lost power in elections around the world, including, of course, in the U.S. As the economy reopened after the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed. And in the U.S., consumer price inflation peaked at over 8% in 2022.

And this hit people really hard because they couldn’t afford groceries. And this is why Donald Trump won, because voters associated the inflation and economic problems with the Democratic Party, with Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. And they refused to provide an economic alternative because, of course, the Democrats, like the Republicans, are also funded by billionaires on Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

And they didn’t want to implement the kinds of progressive economic policies that would be needed to actually tax the rich and provide more opportunities and reduce living costs for working class Americans. So as a result, Trump won. But what’s very important to understand about the 2024 election is that just because Trump won does not mean that he represented the majority of the U.S. population.

Many people essentially voted for him as a protest vote. And if you actually look at these statistics, and I made an infographic here, you can see that Trump only got 77.3 million votes compared to Kamala Harris, who got 75 million. So he got 2 million more votes.

And Trump did get 49.8 percent of the overall votes compared to Kamala Harris, who got 48.3 percent. However, turnout was a bit under 64 percent. That is, around one third of eligible Americans did not vote in the election.

So in other words, Donald Trump only won 31.6 percent of eligible voters, and Kamala Harris only won 30.7 percent. So neither candidate got even one third of the eligible voting population to come out to support them. Trump never represented the majority of the U.S. population, and essentially the reason that he won the election is because the Democrats lost.

It’s not because Trump was popular. It’s because the Democrats were even less popular. We can see this clearly reflected in Trump’s very low approval rating.

In fact, the Economic Times reported that Donald Trump’s net approval rating in 2025 has reached the lowest seen in 70 years. And this is according to polls from numerous sources, including CNN, which leans Democrat, and Fox, which leans Republican, and other sources. They noted that historically, every U.S. president since 1937 has maintained a positive net approval rating by this point in their presidency.

Trump is two months into his term. This is known as the honeymoon period. And excluding Trump, every other president for the last 70 years had a net positive approval rating.

But Trump’s net approval rating is still negative, even in his honeymoon period. And what’s so funny is the White House published a press release boasting that Trump ties for highest approval he’s ever had. And the White House cited an NBC poll, and they linked to a report on this NBC poll boasting that Trump is supposedly popular.

If you actually go to this NBC poll that the Trump White House shared, you can see that it shows that 51% of Americans disapprove of Trump and only 47% approve of him. And those are the best ratings that he’s ever had. So he’s never had net positive approval as president.

They’ve always been negative. And it’s going to be further downhill from here because every U.S. president, again, for seven years has had net positive approval during the honeymoon period when things are easy at the beginning. But in a year or two from now, those approval ratings are going to fall much, much more.

And if you look at this NBC poll that the White House itself promoted, they found that only 18% of U.S. voters rate the economy as excellent or good. Fifty four percent of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy. Only 44% approve and 55% disapprove of how he’s dealing with inflation and the cost of living crisis, whereas only 42% approve.

And it’s very easy to see why people are so angry, because the U.S. economy has been benefiting the rich at the expense of everyone else. And this is not just Trump’s problem. I want to be clear about this.

This is a bipartisan issue. When Biden was president, we saw many of the same issues because the U.S. government is controlled by a small handful of corporate oligarchs of billionaires in Silicon Valley and in Wall Street. And we saw that very clearly symbolically reflected in Donald Trump’s inauguration with all the billionaires sitting with his cabinet members.

But it’s true for the Democrats as well. Going back to the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, when the Obama administration bailed out the rich. It’s a little like, you know, sometimes you go to Wall Street and folks be grumbling about anti-business.

I said, have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office, where they are now? What what are you talking? What are you complaining about? Just say thank you, please. Leading up to the 2024 election, the billionaire CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, you know, who’s having friendly phone calls with Donald Trump regularly, he said in the lead up to the election that it doesn’t matter who wins because either way, Wall Street would benefit from the Republicans or the Democrats. The difference is that Trump has just made it blatant.

He doesn’t even pretend now that he’s president. When he was campaigning, it was different. But now he doesn’t even pretend that he’s not supporting the rich.

He’s blatantly openly doing it. And he appointed the world’s richest billionaire oligarch, Elon Musk, to a top senior level in his administration. And Trump is holding press conferences at the White House with Elon Musk and telling Americans to buy Tesla cars to help pump Tesla stock, which is falling, to help make the world’s richest man even richer.

And let me tell you, you do it to Tesla and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you and you’re going to you’re going to go through hell. Now, the Wall Street Journal published a very important report that provides a glimpse into how the U.S. economy benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. It’s titled The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People.

This article noted that the top 10 percent of richest Americans account for 49.7 percent of all spending in the economy. That is to say, half of all spending is the 10 percent richest people. And three decades ago, that figure was 36 percent.

It’s now basically 50 percent. So over time, the U.S. economy depends more and more on rich people. And this article estimated that the spending of the top 10 percent of richest Americans accounts for nearly one third of GDP.

This is why I was always very skeptical of the reports in the financial press boasting of what they called American exceptionalism, saying the U.S. economy was so strong that GDP growth was so much higher than in other economies like in Europe, which have been in stagnation or recession. And as Fortune magazine put it in June of 2024, why the U.S. stock market could continue dominating. It was a big bubble.

It was because rich people in the U.S. were driving economic growth. Again, according to The Wall Street Journal, the top 10 percent of richest Americans accounted for nearly one third of GDP. So, yeah, GDP figures looked like they were great, but a lot of that was being driven by the rich, by the finance sector, by finance, insurance and real estate, the fire sector.

And average working class people were really struggling. Now, another statistic that the financial press was constantly quoting to claim that the U.S. economy was so healthy was the unemployment rate. And it looks like the official unemployment rate is very low at 4.1 percent, certainly compared to after the financial crisis of 2008, when the unemployment rate briefly hit 10 percent in October of 2009.

However, the reason that this figure is misleading is that in the last 15 years or so, what we’ve seen is a massive rise in informal work in the gig economy. People who drive cars for Uber or Lyft or, you know, they work with other apps. An economist at the Boston Fed estimated that as many as seven million U.S. workers are working in the gig economy and therefore they are not being counted in the unemployment statistics.

So a lot of people, they lose their job. And instead of going on unemployment benefits, which are very low, I mean, you’re living in poverty essentially, and they’re also, you know, very limited. So instead of dealing with all of that, a lot of people simply, they join the gig economy and they drive Uber and they’re not counted in the unemployment figures.

But really, they are unemployed, or at the very least, they are very significantly underemployed. There are a lot of people with advanced degrees and training who can’t find a good job. So they’re simply working in the gig economy, which makes the unemployment rate look lower than it actually is.

And even for workers who do have jobs, the situation is not good. In fact, wages in the U.S., real wages adjusted for inflation, have been largely stagnant since the 1970s. This study that I’m looking at is from 2018, and it shows that the average wage in the U.S. peaked in the late 1970s.

And as of 2018, they had not increased in 40 years. After this study was published, real wages slightly increased, around the time of the pandemic, when people got, you know, checks due to the pandemic and other forms of social support. But then with the inflation following the pandemic, a lot of people’s real wages did not keep up with the inflation and wages have been stagnant largely.

And this is despite the fact that there’s been a massive increase in productivity in this time period, which is largely due to new technologies. So if you look at the increase in productivity since the 1970s, it has been massive. And yet real wages were stagnant in that same period.

Now, those studies were looking at average inflation adjusted wages. However, averages can be misleading, because if rich people get paid much, much more, but everyone else gets paid less, it can look like the average increases or stays steady, when in reality, it’s only a small percentage of workers who are benefiting. And this is exactly what has happened in the past four decades in the U.S. The Congressional Research Service published very interesting data.

It looks at the inflation adjusted wages of three different sectors of U.S. society between 1979 and 2019. When they say the 10th percentile, that means that 10 percent of Americans are poorer than them, and 90 percent are richer than them. And their real wages only increased by 6.5 percent in this period.

In the same 40 years, if you look at the 50th percentile, that is the median American worker, half of the population is poorer than them, half of the population is richer than them. Their real wages only increased by 8.8 percent, so relatively stagnant. But at the same time, if you look at wealthy Americans at the 90th percentile, so they’re not the richest.

The richest Americans would be the 99th percentile or 99.9 percentile. The 90th percentile means that they’re richer than 90 percent of the population, but 10 percent is still richer than them. So this is not the super rich, but these are wealthy Americans.

Their real wages increased by 41.3 percent over these 40 years. And what’s striking is you can look at different demographics and see basically the same trend. If you look at men, women, white non-Hispanic, black non-Hispanic, and Hispanic, you can see that the rich got richer while the real wages of poor workers and the median worker was stagnant throughout this period.

And it’s not a coincidence that throughout this period, since the 1980s, as the U.S. economy de-industrialized, what happened? Wages were stagnant in the non-financial sector, but they skyrocketed in the financial sector. And not just wages, but other forms of compensation. The U.S. government did a report after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

It’s called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report. And they found that since the 1970s, compensation in the non-financial sector was stagnant, whereas compensation in the financial sector doubled. So there you go.

I mean, the U.S. economy financialized and de-industrialized, and a small handful of rich people benefited, whereas the majority of the population did not benefit. So all of this explains why Trump won the election. He promised cynically that he was going to help working class people and bring back good manufacturing jobs, but then he just filled his administration with 13 billionaires.

And his policies result in cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, while in reality increasing taxes on poor and working people, on 95% of the population. And the main reason that Trump won the 2024 election is because of inflation. I’ve already established that.

He promised he was going to bring down inflation, and voters associated the post-pandemic inflation due to the global supply chain shocks with the Democrats, with Biden and Harris, despite the fact that inflation was a global problem, not only a problem in the U.S. And, you know, Trump came in, and what has happened? Consumer price inflation continues to increase in the U.S. So Trump is not bringing down inflation. In fact, the opposite is happening. Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is giving speeches in which he tells Americans to stop wanting cheap goods.

He said, quote, access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream, end quote, because the Trump administration knows that Trump’s tariffs are going to result in an increase in inflation because the U.S. imports so many goods. So the cost of consumer goods at Walmart is going to go up. And the Trump administration is saying, well, stop complaining.

That’s not what the American dream is about. Now, in a second, I’m going to respond to this and talk about why it’s completely absurd that Scott Besant is saying this. But first of all, I want to talk about who Scott Besant is.

Do you know who he is? He is a billionaire hedge fund manager. So Trump claims that he’s going to help working class Americans. But in order to oversee U.S. economic policy at the Treasury, he appoints a billionaire from Wall Street.

And what’s so funny about this in a kind of twisted way is that Scott Besant started his career working for George Soros, the billionaire investor who is a major funder of the Democratic Party. And he’s like the main boogeyman, the main villain of the Republican Party. In fact, during his first term as president back in 2018, Trump claimed that Soros was funding protesters to go out and protest against Trump.

And then as Trump was campaigning for president in 2023, his official campaign published an email with a graphic, you know, a meme showing Soros over the White House as the puppet master controlling Joe Biden. And it said, I thought when I got to be president, I’d get to give orders, but I take orders more than I ever did. This was an official graphic shared by the Trump campaign in 2023, portraying the U.S. President Joe Biden as a puppet of George Soros.

But then Trump chose one of Soros’ close allies, the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Besant, to be his secretary of the Treasury. I mean, this shows how these billionaire oligarchs, they’re all friends with each other. And politically, you know, they’ll blame other billionaires and say that they’re funding my opposition and protesters.

But at the end of the day, they’re all part of one club. And we’re not part of that club. They’re in the billionaire oligarch club.

And they make economic policy on behalf of each other, not on behalf of the majority of working class people. So this brings me back to the speech that Treasury Secretary Besant gave to the Economic Club of New York in March. This is a meeting of, you know, wealthy elites.

And in his speech, Besant said this. Access to cheap goods is not the asset, is not the essence of the American dream. The American dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility and economic security.

Now, in a moment here, I’ll respond to this talking point of the so-called American dream, which is a myth. It doesn’t exist. But Besant is trying to push this idea that the American dream does not rely on cheap access to consumer goods.

What is he talking about? What he’s acknowledging is that the Trump administration’s tariffs are going to result in a massive increase in the cost of consumer goods in the U.S. because they’re largely imported from foreign countries. What this is all really about is that the U.S. economy is in the process of trying to decouple from China because I’ve already established how wages for average working people in the U.S. were largely stagnant since the 1970s. So the reason that people did not completely revolt, you know, rebel and have a revolution is because while their wages were stagnant, at the same time, the cost of consumer goods fell, especially for advanced technologies.

And why is that? Because those goods were produced in other countries, especially in China, which became the factory of the world, the world’s largest manufacturing power. So as real U.S. wages were stagnant, China was exporting deflation. And if you look at the costs of consumer goods like TVs and toys and cell phones, they plummeted.

They’re much more affordable today, largely because of China. And also a few other Southeast Asian economies. Vietnam has become a major hub for producing technology.

But the U.S. deindustrialized. These products were designed by U.S. big tech corporations but manufactured abroad. Meanwhile, as consumer goods saw deflation in the U.S., we saw massive inflation in the costs of services like health care, like college tuition, education, like child care, and also food and housing.

Those are the kinds of things that could not be produced in China and then exported to the U.S. So it’s because of China largely that there was deflation in consumer goods. But meanwhile, in the U.S., as the rich got richer and richer, and they bought up the houses, and as private universities massively increased the cost of tuition, much more than inflation, and as privatized for-profit health companies and health insurance companies massively increased the cost of health care, average working people in the U.S. have less and less disposable income that actually can go to spend on living a comfortable life because they’re spending so much on health care, education, housing, and food. And now what is the Trump administration saying? They’re saying that the costs of consumer goods are also going to increase.

So all of those cheap goods you got from China throughout this era when your wages were stagnant, well, we’re going to make those goods even more expensive through tariffs. Now in terms of the tariffs, Trump does claim that he’s using tariffs to try to re-industrialize the U.S. And I do think that the U.S. does desperately need to be re-industrialized. However, I explained in a previous video, which I will link to in the description below, how the Trump administration’s policies are not actually going to succeed in re-industrializing the U.S. I analyzed a speech by Vice President J.D. Vance, who claimed at a summit organized by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, that the Trump administration is supposedly going to bring about the re-industrialization of the U.S. and bring back good manufacturing jobs for working class Americans.

I explained why these are false promises and why tariffs are not going to do that and why the U.S. government would actually need a strong industrial policy using a government-led, state-led economic program of transformation that would also involve massive taxes on the rich. So in other words, the exact opposite of the anti-government kind of free market policies being pursued by the Trump administration, which is basically Reaganism 2.0. But instead of simply repeating the argument that I already made in that very long video, I will link to it in the description below, and you should check it out after you finish this current episode that you’re listening to now. This is why the billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Besant says the American dream is not about access to cheap goods.

But as I said, even the idea of the so-called American dream is a myth. Let’s look at some studies here, and we can see that it’s not true. If you look at income mobility, that is, children who grow up to earn more than their parents, in the U.S., income mobility is much lower than in other rich countries.

But even in other rich countries, over time, income mobility is falling because we see the rich are getting richer and richer, and poor and working people are finding it very difficult to move up and make more money. Economists at elite U.S. universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, published a groundbreaking study in 2017 that looked at income mobility since 1940, and they concluded that the American dream was fading. They showed that in the 1940s, this is the peak of the New Deal era under FDR, around 90% of children ended up earning more than their parents.

And that figure fell and fell, and it’s natural. I mean, over time, you can’t sustain that permanently. But by the 1980s, that figure had fallen to just around 50%.

These economists found that in the 1940s, the median child in the U.S. ended up growing up to have an income that was roughly three times the income of their parents. By the 1980s, that figure had fallen to one. That is to say that the median child ended up growing up to have the exact same income as their parents.

That is to say there is very little income mobility. There is no American dream. It’s a myth.

And that’s just looking at income. We know that the U.S. has actually been declining. And yes, a lot of that was because of the pandemic, but it’s not just because of the pandemic.

If you look at the data of life expectancy in other rich countries, the U.S. is significantly below other rich countries. A study by the University of North Carolina published in 2022 found that Americans aged 15 to 24 are twice as likely to die as their peers in France, Germany, Japan, and other wealthy nations, while the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is up to three times higher. The results of this study were truly shocking and showed how the U.S. really is an outlier even when it comes to other rich countries.

So it’s not just an issue of inequality, which is obviously a very big issue in the U.S., but there are also serious problems with falling life expectancy. This is a society in severe crisis. It’s clear that the election of Donald Trump is a reflection of this, not only in 2024, but also when he won the election the first time in 2016, because Trump was responding to these many problems that exist in the U.S., but instead of dealing with the root cause of these problems, which is growing inequality, the fact that rich oligarchs take up more and more wealth and don’t pay taxes, and the government has been taken over by corporations and lobbying controls U.S. policy.

It’s a completely corrupt system. He claimed he was going to drain the swamp, but instead Trump has deepened the corruption. Trump and his friends are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Trump meme coin and they’re exploiting their own supporters.

They’re giving a green light to bribery and money laundering. And while Trump is cutting taxes on the richest people in the U.S., he’s scapegoating the poorest and most marginalized people. He’s scapegoating immigrants and saying, your problems are not caused by the billionaires I’m surrounded by who don’t pay taxes.

Your problems are caused by poor undocumented immigrants, which by the way, the entire U.S. economy relies on undocumented workers. And if he really does do mass deportations, it’s going to cause even more severe economic problems. There are going to be massive shortages of workers in the agricultural sector, which is needed to bring down food prices.

And he says he wants to stop inflation, but deporting agricultural workers is going to likely lead to more food inflation, which is really the reason that he won the election in the first place. And deporting immigrants is going to lead to a shortage of workers in the construction sector. And as fewer houses are built, housing prices are going to go up even further, which is another reason why people are so angry at the economy in the U.S. Average working people can’t afford a house.

And yet Trump says by deporting immigrants, we’re going to solve all these economic problems. So Trump wants to scapegoat people like immigrants and LGBT people for these economic problems caused by billionaires like he himself and his friends who are running the U.S. government. Meanwhile, there are more and more warning signs that the U.S. could soon be entering a recession in no small part due to Trump’s policies, especially his tariffs.

Economists at the largest U.S. bank, JPMorgan Chase, say that there’s a 40 percent chance of the U.S. going into a recession. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta published a shocking report in which it estimated that U.S. GDP in the first quarter of 2025 may shrink by 1.8 percent. Now, there were some critics of this study who said that this is largely because a lot of companies have been massively increasing their imports because of expectations of tariffs.

And when you see increases in imports, it actually leads GDP figures to fall because later on those imported goods will be consumed in the economy, which will be counted as part of consumption in GDP. And you don’t want to count that two times. So maybe this could simply be because of a big increase in imports, but it’s still a major warning sign that the Atlanta Fed is predicting GDP shrinking.

And this also comes at a time when credit card delinquencies in the U.S. are rising. A record number of Americans are falling behind on paying their auto loans for their cars. Mortgage delinquencies are also on the rise in the U.S. and housing prices hit a record high in the U.S. in 2024.

They’re less and less affordable for average working people. Since the 2008 financial crisis, rent in the U.S. has grown much faster than wages for the bottom 90 percent of Americans. Of course, the top 10 percent richest Americans are getting much, much richer, but everyone else is struggling to pay rent.

In 2002, the median U.S. worker had to work around 50-ish hours every month in order to pay the median rent, and the person on minimum wage had to work around 110 hours every month to pay the median monthly rent. As of 2022, the median U.S. worker has to work around 70 hours to pay median rent, and a person on the minimum wage has to work 180 hours per month to pay the median monthly rent. And this is getting worse over time, not better.

Back in the 1960s, only around 20 percent of U.S. households spent more than 30 percent of family income on rent. As of the 2010s and 2020, 45 percent of U.S. households spend more than 30 percent of family income on rent. And nearly one quarter of all U.S. households spend more than 50 percent of their family income on rent.

This is a severe problem. So many people in the U.S. cannot afford housing and can’t even afford food with high rates of inflation. And again, this is why Donald Trump won the 2024 election.

It was because the Democrats’ loss, because the Biden-Harris administration did not take action to actually make the cost of living lower for average working people, because like Trump, they serve the interests of billionaires. And all of the signs show that Trump is making it even worse and that his policies are benefiting billionaires at the expense of everyone else. Again, the perfect symbolism of is that Elon Musk was the largest donor in the 2024 U.S. election.

He donated $288 million to getting Trump and MAGA Republicans elected. In other words, the world’s richest man basically bought himself a position in the White House. He now has an office in the White House.

And another top donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign was the Wall Street billionaire Stephen Schwartzman, who’s the highest paid corporate executive on Wall Street. And he’s the CEO of Blackstone, which is the largest alternative investment manager on earth. And as Bloomberg pointed out, the Blackstone CEO is now well positioned to influence Trump on his tax policies, that is to continue to cut taxes on the rich and corporations.

And by the way, you know who the largest landlord is in the U.S.? It’s Blackstone, whose CEO was one of the main donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Blackstone owns and manages more than 300,000 rental housing units in the U.S. And it’s notorious for buying up housing units, evicting poor and working class people who live there, and then massively increasing rents. I mean, they’re basically a large corporate slumlord.

So Trump and his donors and his friends and the people he appointed to run his administration are creating policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the majority of people in the U.S. When Trump claimed he was going to help working class Americans, he was just trying to win their vote. He didn’t actually mean it. When Trump cynically did his, you know, stunt, his photo op at McDonald’s claiming to be a man of the working class, he was just trying to cynically get votes.

Trump’s actual agenda benefits rich elites at the expense of everyone else. And we shouldn’t be surprised because this is exactly what Trump did in his first term, and he’s repeating it yet again now in his second term. Now, the last thing that I’ll say today before I conclude is I don’t want everyone to feel hopeless.

I don’t want this to be pessimistic and people to think that it’s inevitable that these rich oligarchs are going to control everything and the government’s never going to help people. Instead, I actually want to briefly talk about a few examples of countries where I think the government is actually fighting back against these oligarchs and acting on behalf of working people trying to make their lives better. Now, earlier, I mentioned that the pandemic caused supply chain disruptions that caused inflation around the world, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

And this meant that many incumbent parties lost power in elections that were held because voters blamed the incumbents for the inflation and the economic problems. Now, that phenomenon did happen in many nations, but not all countries. There were some noble exceptions.

One of those exceptions is the southern neighbor of the U.S., Mexico, where the people voted for a true populist, a left-wing populist leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, back in 2018. He was from the populist left-wing Morena party, which massively expanded social programs to help poor and working people and fought back against the oligarchy, the exact opposite of what Trump has been doing. And AMLO was so popular, he was one of the most popular presidents on earth, that his political ally from the left-wing Morena party, Claudia Scheinbaum, won the 2024 election in a landslide.

So despite the inflation and economic problems caused by the pandemic, the left-wing Morena party not only did it stay in power in Mexico, it actually increased its voter share. And it’s easy to explain why. It’s because average working class Mexicans have a much better standard of living today, thanks to the progressive redistributive economic policies of AMLO.

And under his six-year term, because in Mexico presidents have six years in office, what we saw is that the median wage for workers in Mexico massively increased much faster than inflation. So real wages increased substantially, and the government significantly increased the minimum wage. And Claudia Scheinbaum has continued with these very progressive populist policies, and that’s why she’s one of the most popular leaders on earth.

Polls have found that she has an 80% approval rating. 80%, and only 11% of the population is against her, which is the rich elites. So it’s the exact opposite of Trump.

Trump’s real base of support are the rich elites, big billionaire oligarchs who fill his administration. Whereas in Mexico, the working class, the majority of the population supports the progressive left-wing populist government, and the small handful of elites are against it. This poster also asked Mexicans why they support President Scheinbaum, and they said what their favorite thing is, the best thing that she’s doing.

And the number one response was that they are proud that she’s defending the country against Donald Trump’s threats. So, you know, the more that Trump threatens Mexico, he’s actually increasing support for Mexico’s left-wing populist government. But it’s not just that.

Other common responses were that the Morena government in Mexico is expanding social programs, including support for retirees, including financial support for students through scholarships, including social programs, continuing the work that AMLO did, also supporting migrants, providing support to women, investing in public security, investing in infrastructure and public works. Now, I’m not saying that Mexico is utopia. Obviously, there are a lot of issues, especially with insecurity and violence is a huge problem in Mexico.

And this is not a problem that can just be simply solved in a year or two. It’s going to take a long time with a lot of struggle, especially considering that Mexico’s northern neighbor, the U.S., is flooding the country with weapons and the U.S. military industrial complex, U.S. weapons corporations profit from trafficking guns into Mexico. So, again, I’m not trying to say that Mexico is perfect.

But what I am saying is that the Mexican government demonstrates that it’s possible to have a true, a real populist government. You know, Trump and J.D. Vance claim to be so-called populist, which is completely bogus. They’re completely cynical.

They’re actually representing billionaire oligarch elites in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. And using bogus populist rhetoric, they scapegoat marginalized groups like immigrants and LGBT people. And they criticize the media and people say, oh, they’re populist.

That’s not populism. Mexico’s left wing government is an actual example of real progressive populism, where the government is standing up for working class people and poor people and fighting back against the rich oligarchs and millionaires and billionaires who, by the way, in Mexico are supported by the U.S. So I think Mexico is a good example that the U.S. can learn from. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of racism in the U.S. toward Mexico.

But the point I’m trying to get at is that not everything is doomed. The U.S. government is uniquely corrupt and uniquely beholden to, controlled by big corporations and billionaire oligarchs. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Another example is China. Of course, a country constantly demonized by the U.S. corporate media. But you know, in China, in the past 40 years, the median income in China has increased by 10 times, 10 times.

You know, we hear a lot of coverage about India’s economic growth in the Western media because the U.S. wants to recruit India against China. And India has made progress in the past 40 years. Median income has doubled.

However, in China, it has increased by 10 times. So two times in India, 10 times in China. And yet the U.S. government and U.S. media constantly say positive things about India and constantly criticize China.

There’s all this ridiculous propaganda in the U.S. media falsely claiming that workers in China are treated like slaves. They’re not paid. They exploit children.

It’s all false. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. If you look at manufacturing wages in China in the past 20 years, they have increased by more than eight times over, growing way faster than any other country surrounding China, including in India.

Again, China has made enormous progress. In the past few decades, the Chinese government has helped to lift 800 million people out of poverty. 800 million.

According to the World Bank, just China accounts for three quarters of global extreme poverty reduction. Just China. This shows what a government can do when it actually acts in the interest of working class people, not in the interest of billionaire elites.

And this is why it’s not surprising that the Chinese government is very popular internally. And this is not just propaganda from the Chinese media. This is according to a study conducted by Harvard University’s elite Kennedy School.

They found that the central government in China has support of around 90 percent of the population and provincial governments are a little less popular, around 80 percent. There are some criticisms. So obviously, it’s not perfect, not 100 percent, but it’s easy to explain why people are so happy with their government.

It’s because in two generations, the majority of the population, 800 million people, have been lifted out of poverty. It’s because median incomes have increased 10 times over in the past 40 years. If the government does that, it’s easy to be popular.

And today, there are still issues in China. For instance, pollution used to be a huge issue, which was largely cleaned up. And another issue is inequality.

So hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, but there still is a lot of inequality. There still are some very rich people and some people who are still struggling. So now the government is taking action to fight inequality, to redistribute wealth, which is the exact opposite of what the U.S. government has been doing and many other Western governments have been doing.

And China is promoting what’s known as the common prosperity drive. So prosperity is shared among the entire population and not just a small handful of elites. So the point I’m getting at is that it’s not inevitable that the government is always controlled by these oligarchs.

The U.S. government is uniquely corrupt. The U.S. capitalist system is deeply oligarchical and undemocratic, and it has to be fundamentally changed. And Donald Trump is not the man who’s going to do that.

Trump’s so-called populism is completely fake. It’s completely cynical. And all he’s trying to do is scapegoat and demonize marginalized communities, some of the poorest people in society.

And at the same time, his policies are benefiting a small handful of corporate elites, billionaire elites at the expense of the rest of the population. On that note, I’m going to conclude. I am Ben Norton, the editor-in-chief of Geopolitical Economy Report.

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