Our Economy Is Not For All Or Even Most Americans
I don’t have much hope that the economy continues as if it was 2024.
We are now firmly ensconced in the Trump regime. The U.S. economy has been anything but part of a corporatist welfare state through many administrations now. Yet somehow in the past, every once in a while, we gave our citizens a taste of what the government could provide them with.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and the ACA are a few of those programs. Most of the wealth of the nation was still concentrated in the hands of the super-rich and large corporations, but there was help for those in need. Now under Trump, people no longer count except to promulgate the sound of a good slogan.
In the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, the bottom 20% of Americans will receive a $150 tax deduction. The next 20% of those earning $34,601 to $66,800 will receive $750, the middle quintile to $119,200 $1,780, the fourth quintile for earnings of $217,100, the tax savings will be $3460, and the top quintile above $217,101 would save $12,540.
Those in the top 1%, which is $1,149,000 and above, will receive on average $75,410. Those in the top 0.1%, which is $5,185,000 on average, will receive an additional $286,440. The big money is going to those who can afford to pay more. This is not what a progressive income tax system should look like. It would be much fairer to have a flat tax where you pay a percentage of your income from dollar one regardless of whether it is $10,000 a year or earning in the billions.
But the real kicker is we treat our corporations better than individual Americans. The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T will receive $1.5 to $2 billion in cash tax savings this year because of the Big Beautiful Bill. Meta will save $11 billion. Amazon $15.7 billion which, if passed through to stockholders, will have Jeff Bezos earning an additional $1.3 billion from Amazon alone.
There is nothing inherently wrong with making money. Decades-long growth can only be counted on when the American people are also benefiting. While many citizens have been indoctrinated to believe that taxes are evil, they haven’t until now seen a correlation between tax cuts and benefit cuts.
In places like the Nordic countries, their businesses are not coddled and given the equivalent of subsidies and tax carve outs. People are the ones that are protected from economic adversity. For some time, the U.S. government has been the arbiter of whether this or that company survives, and that has only accelerated under the Trump administration.
Between tariffs and tax policy, in a few years our country will not be able to compete on the world stage. Bad companies and practices will be allowed to continue especially if you have friends in high places. That ultimately will sap our entrepreneurial spirit.
As our deficit grows and makes our economy less robust, what are the politicians and corporatists trying to achieve? Perhaps they believe that their dollars will all be turned into crypto and meme coins and will be redeemable in some other form of wealth. Where will the billionaire class go when America is no longer viable?
When does greed stop and societal good take over? This America is not the one where those such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers gave their money away for libraries, schools, parks, and universities. Too bad the president wants to imitate the Gilded Age in ostentation but not in largesse.
Lant Pritchett from the Harvard Business School wrote in a 2015 paper: “There are two dominant narratives about taxation. One is taxes are the ‘price we pay for a civilized society’ (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). In this view taxes are not a necessary evil but a positive good…The other view is that taxes are ‘tribute to Leviathan’ -a pure involuntary extraction from those engaged in economic production to those who control coercive power producing no reciprocal benefit.”
Like Goldilocks’ porridge, taxes shouldn’t be too hot or too cold. They need to be just right. With our deficit piling up to astronomical levels and the American people with a smaller and smaller stake in the outcome of our society, we too may have gone too far in appeasing the super wealthy and corporations. We need to go back to a place of equilibrium.
