Trump admin tells Americans (Uncut) 03-30-2025

Trump admin tells Americans: Stop expecting cheap products, inflation is here to stay

Access to cheap goods is not the asset, is not the essence of the American dream. Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Besant, is giving speeches in which he tells Americans to stop wanting cheap goods 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.

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, a meme showing Soros over the White House as the puppet master controlling Joe Biden. 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 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.

Wages for average working people in the U.S. were largely stagnant since the 1970s. 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. And yet real wages were stagnant in that same period.

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 is 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 costs 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. 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, you know, this is the peak of the New Deal era under FDR, around 90 percent 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 percent.

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 can see similar results if we look at life expectancy in the U.S. Life expectancy in 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.

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.

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. This article noted that the top 10% of richest Americans account for 49.7% of all spending in the economy. That is to say, half of all spending is the 10% richest people.

And three decades ago, that figure was 36%. It’s now basically 50%. 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% of richest Americans accounts for nearly one third of GDP. 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.

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% 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%. Now, there were some critics of this study who said that this is 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% of Americans. Of course, the top 10% 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 a 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% of U.S. households spent more than 30% of family income on rent. As of the 2010s and 2020, 45% of U.S. households spend more than 30% of family income on rent.

And nearly one quarter of all U.S. households spend more than 50% 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 lost 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 this is that Elon Musk was the 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 Schwarzman, 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.

On that note, I’m going to conclude. I am Ben Norton, the Editor-in-Chief of Geopolitical Economy Report. Please like and subscribe.

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