Donald Trump is a plutocrat pretending to be a populist. If you voted for Trump's Plutocracy thinking they would help out the working-class, you've been conned by billionaire con-men.
The average salary in 2024 for a full-time worker in America was around 60 thousand per year. Most people work for about 50 years of their career (20s-70ish). If you made an average of 60k per year for a 50 year career, your entire life's earnings would be about 3 million dollars. If you made 100k annually on average over a 50 year working career it would amount to 5 million dollars. An average of 200k a year would net you 10 million dollars over 50 years. If you’re anywhere near these economic brackets, Donald Trump does not represent your economic interests. Trump represents the billionaire class, and the lifetime earnings of the working-class is chump change to the billionaires.
“Jeff Bezos Made Over $7.9 Million An Hour Every Hour In 2023 —
In Under 13 Minutes, He Brought In The Equivalent Of What The Typical Person Earns In A Lifetime”
Bezos is not an anomaly in that regard; the billionaire class extracts nearly all of the wealth the American working-class produces leaving just enough for the working-class to barely afford to survive.
A member of the Walton family receives more in a minute than a Walmart worker would make in a year, a claim which was confirmed by the Washington Post;
When a business makes money there is a constant struggle between the owners and executives versus the workers over where that money goes. Since the Trickle-down economics era, we have chosen as a society to give nearly everything to the owners and executives while cutting the workers out as much as possible. Class warfare is the most significant aspect of American politics today, and one of the main battles is for compensation. The working-class has been severely losing that battle to the tune of $2.5 trillion of lost wages every year. It all adds up to an upwards redistribution of wealth costing the American working-class $50 trillion.
The Billionaire class has been winning the last 50 years of class warfare so much that our economy is now corrupted to a truly absurd level. Corporations like Amazon and Walmart make billions of dollars every year, enriching their shareholders to an extreme degree, while their full-time workers are unable to afford basic living expenses. The Government Accountability Office found that 70% of welfare recipients worked full-time mostly at low-wage corporations; the top 5 being Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Mcdonalds.
Now, every member of the working-class makes much less money so that the economic elites get to keep more.
“The price of inequality? Lost annual income of $42,000 for typical worker…
In 2018, the typical full-time worker earned about $50,000 — but if that same worker had kept up with the economy's expansion, they would have earned $92,000 annually, the Rand analysis found…” (CBS News)
One of my biggest issues with Trump is that he came into politics claiming the system is rigged and our politicians rigged it to serve their rich donors. Unfortunately, he joined into that corrupt system and continued on pushing the same broken GOP platform of cutting taxes for the elites, screwing over the working-class, and deregulating the economy for big business. Donald Trump’s first administration was a continuation of the political establishment serving their rich donors and betraying their voters. Trump cosplays as a man of the people, but he is one of the most elite of the elites.
Trump represents America's billionaire class and embodies our corrupt political system. His rhetoric may be pro-worker, but his agenda is designed by and for the billionaire class to expand their wealth and control over ordinary people. Donald Trump is right that the American political and economic systems are rigged, but he is wrong about how and who did it. Worst of all he is aligning with the extraordinarily greedy super villains the father of Capitalism warned us about.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
-Adam Smith
So now the Trump agenda in his second term will be more of the same. The modern GOP platform is the reverse Robin Hood; taking from the poor to give to the rich. With that aim in mind, Donald Trump is assembling a team of unbelievably greedy super-elites to run his administration. Trump’s cabinet will be a who’s who club of billionaire douchebags trying to take more money and power for themselves at your expense.
“In a recruitment process that appears to mock his campaign’s appeal to working-class voters, the president-elect has brazenly tapped a gallery of mega-rich backers for key positions that, in some instances, will give them power to cut spending on public services that are used by the most poor and vulnerable…
The net result will be the wealthiest administration in US history – worth a total of $340bn at the start of this week....”
Trump’s cabinet is made up of the billionaires class representing their own interests. If you voted for Trump’s Plutocrats because you thought they cared about your economic hardship, then you’re the victim of an elaborate con concocted by the elites. The elites spread their false narrative using their pawns in the media claiming that they represent the ordinary working Americans just so that they can get into power and betray their voters.
The modern GOP says a lot of pro-worker rhetoric and talks a big game about standing up for ordinary people, but that is all talk. Their actual policy is totally opposed to the interests of the working-class. Elon Musk, who bought his way into Trump’s administration by spending over $277 million on Trump’s campaign is now promising Economic Hardship for ordinary Americans.
One of the big policy disagreements in D.C. is whether to cut social security or fully fund and expand it. The GOP wants to cut it while Bernie Sanders wants to fund it for the next 75 years while expanding benefits.
Elon Musk is personally invested in this disagreement because Bernie would end the tax exemption for income over $160,000 per year meaning billionaires like Musk would personally fund it for the rest of America. But Musk wants to become the world’s first trillionaire, and he would rather the elderly go with less rather than keeping less for himself. In addition Musk is trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which was created to return money to consumers from corporations engaging in fraud or other predatory practices. Musk also wants to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board which protects the rights of workers to form a union and practice collective bargaining, probably something to do with him making 40,000 times the average Tesla employee’s compensation. So will Trump side with the cartoonishly greedy Elon Musk or will he stand up for the 99% against his billionaire backers? Another Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy wants to cut food assistance to struggling families in America;
In a similar crackdown on Medicaid eligibility, more than 5 million children lost access to health insurance with the primary cause being “Procedural and paperwork issues.” What the billionaires call eliminating waste & fraud is really just scapegoating those on welfare to deflect attention away from themselves. A crackdown on SNAP overpayments under the guise of eliminating waste & fraud would mainly create a bureaucratic mess saving little while kicking kids off of food assistance in the meantime for more procedural and paperwork issues. Kids shouldn’t go hungry because the billionaires want to scapegoat them for America’s national debt crisis, the Pentagon is a much better target for extreme crackdowns.
Just remember, things can get dramatically better in America for ordinary Americans, but that has to come at the expense of the economic elites. The elites have to be willing to suffer the economic hardship of seeing one or two less zeros in their bank account so that ordinary workers can afford to live on a full-time salary. The 1% have been extracting wealth and power from the 99%, so if we lessen their ability to extract from and control our society it will make life worse for those ultra-elites. That’s a good thing for the 99%, but the 1% would stop at nothing to preserve their undeserved wealth and power. When Elon Musk promises economic hardship, it should be for himself and the billionaires he is surrounded by, not the elderly he is trying to kick off of social security or the unionized workers he wants to fire. Things can get dramatically better for the 99%, but under Donald Trump’s term we should expect the billionaires to make things even worse for the working-class. In this next term of the Donald Trump administration, we should expect to see a repeat of his first term and a continuation of America’s upwards redistribution of wealth.
America is a plutocracy, which means government of the economic elites for the economic elites. Just like George Carlin said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”
“There’s a reason for this…Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
―George Carlin
If we want America to get better, we have the transition from a plutocracy to a democracy. America is not a functioning democracy, and if you are not a member of the 1% you are not represented by the Trump administration.
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The economic elites care about their own net worth and financial freedom, not yours. That's why Adam Smith said that the public should have extreme skepticism of the economic agenda of the masters of mankind
Everyone should be skeptical of Trump and Musk's plans for our economy
But there is another way, & it comes from Adam Smith’s Capitalism & the history of American Capitalism
The elites dominated every society in all ages of the world until about 100 years ago; then the Middle Class was created in the US
The labor movement in America began around the time of Abraham Lincoln, then gained real momentum under Theodore Roosevelt
TR gave his New Nationalism speech which advocated for the very changes that inspired FDR’s New Deal & eventually brought about the American Middle class
Unfortunately, after the assassinations of many labor leaders in the 1960s, the form of working-class capitalism represented by the labor movement became viscously stigmatized as socialism. The elites successfully rebranded the interests of the working-class as evil socialism
When the billionaire class talk about economic freedom, they are not talking about your freedom to see a doctor when you’re sick. They are not talking about your freedom to take time off of work to take care of a newborn or elderly family member. They don't support those freedoms
Billionaires are not talking about freedom for the working-class; they do not want to reduce poverty by taking less
They care about their own freedom to extract wealth from others, to cut corners, to put workers & consumers at risk, & to monopolize markets, without consequences
When Bernie Sanders talks about economic freedom, he means making the minimum wage a living wage so that all workers have gainful employment. He's talking about creating fair compensation so the working-class gets way more of the wealth their labor produces & the 1% gets way less
Bernie is talking about getting rid of corruption, market monopolization, & price gouging; & getting rid of corporate leadership prioritizing profit over safety & ethics
And that is why the billionaires are laughing at MAGA; because they vilify their hero & glorify their enemy
MAGA attacks Bernie for being a millionaire while worshipping the billionaire Trump
The Billionaires are laughing that MAGA believe Trump, who aligns with the elites & filled his administration with elites, is on the side of the working-class; laughing all the way to the bank
Trump could change the tax code so that corporations & the ultra wealthy pay more so that taxes could be nearly eliminated for the working-class
Trump could change the economic distribution so that workers make way more money which would all come from CEO pay & stock buybacks
But will he?
That would require him turning his back on the economic elites he surrounded himself with. That would require Trump standing up for organizations like the CFPB & NLRB against billionaire plutocrats like Elon Musk who don’t want oversight.
So, is Donald Trump beholden to Musk?
Does Trump have the balls to take on corruption in our economy & gov't or is he just gonna align with the elites during his 2nd term.
Is he a con-man who never truly stood against corruption?
Only time will tell, but I’m not optimistic
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