When Donald Trump campaigned to be US president in 2024, he promised he would help working-class Americans. He even did a photo op at a McDonald’s, pretending to be a fast food worker.
When he returned to the White House, however, Trump made it clear that his policies would be serving a small handful of billionaire oligarchs, not the majority of the country.
Trump appointed 13 billionaires as top officials in his administration. As Public Citizen reported, this means that the Trump administration represents not just the 1% richest Americans, but the 0.0001%.
The billionaires in the Trump administration — including Elon Musk, the world’s richest person — had a combined wealth of more than $460 billion as of January 2025.
Trump invited the world’s most powerful oligarchs to his inauguration. The billionaire CEOs of Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations symbolically sat with his cabinet members.
Then, just a few hours after he took office, Trump invited three more billionaire oligarchs to the White House, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to do a press conference about artificial intelligence.
As president, Trump has held regular meetings and phone calls with his billionaire supporters, including Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. Fink personally called Trump to ask the White House to help BlackRock buy the ports on both sides of the Panama Canal.
Corruption: greenlighting money laundering, bribery, and crypto scams
As US president, Donald Trump has passed a series of executive orders that have essentially promoted corruption, on behalf of wealthy elites. He gutted an anti-money laundering law, and ended the enforcement of a law that banned bribery.
In an executive order, Trump boasted that allowing bribery will help “America and its companies gaining strategic commercial advantages around the world”. He likewise told reporters that by permitting corruption, “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America”.
Just a few days before Trump returned to the White House, he launched a meme coin named after himself. Reuters reported that the people behind the $TRUMP coin made roughly $100 million in trading fees in just two weeks.
Trump launched the meme coin on the 17th of January, just three days before his inauguration. The value quickly rose, before falling by two-thirds, in what looked a lot like a pump-and-dump scheme.
What was so cynical about this meme coin scandal is that Trump was exploiting his own supporters. 810,000 people who had invested in Trump’s crypto scheme lost money, totaling $2 billion.
Cutting taxes on the rich, while increasing taxes on everyone else
These pro-rich and anti-poor policies are based on the same playbook that Donald Trump pursued in his first term.
In 2017, Trump cut taxes on the rich and corporations. As of 2018, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the US paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of poor and working-class Americans.
When he campaigned for president in 2024, Trump vowed to continue reducing taxes on wealthy elites.
Economists at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the people in the US who will see the highest increase in taxes during Trump’s second term are the poor and the working class, whereas the rich will have their taxes cut.
They calculated that the richest 5% of the US population will have their taxes reduced by around 1.2%, whereas the poorest 20% will see their taxes increased by 4.8% on average.
This is because Trump is massively expanding tariffs, which will disproportionately impact poor and working-class Americans.
Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, which is essentially a tax on consumption, because the US imports many consumer goods from China, Mexico, Canada, and other countries.
Poor and working-class people spend a much higher percentage of their paycheck than rich people do on consumer goods, food, and basic necessities.
If a rich person has millions of dollars of wealth, and they get another million, they’re not going to buy much more food and consumer goods. Their marginal propensity to consume is low.
If a working-class person who is barely making ends meet gets a pay raise, they likely will spend more on food and consumer goods. Their marginal propensity to consume is high.
This means that the burden of the tariffs will be felt much more by poor and working-class Americans.
In other words, Trump is essentially increasing taxes on the working class and cutting taxes on the rich. His administration is overseeing a wealth transfer from the majority of working-class people to the minority of the rich.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the average rich person in the 1% of elite Americans will see their taxes reduced by $36,320, whereas the bottom 95% of Americans will have their taxes increase. The middle class will bear the largest burden.
That study was a projection of what the impact of Trump’s tax policy will be in the future. Analyses of Trump’s policies during his first term as president, from January 2017 to January 2021, came to similar conclusions.
A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the impact of Trump’s 2017 tax law. They found that the richest 1% of Americans had their taxes reduced by $61,090, while the poorest 20% of Americans saw their taxes cut by just $70.
Trump has said that when he was president the first time he cut taxes on all Americans, including poor and working-class Americans. This claim is not technically wrong, but it is very misleading. Wealthy elites enjoyed much, much higher tax breaks than the majority of the population.
This is true not just in terms of the dollar amount, but also the percentage change.
The after-tax income of the richest 5% of Americans increased by around 3%, thanks to Trump’s 2017 tax law, whereas the poorest 20% of Americans saw their after-tax income grow by just 0.4%. The middle class had its after-tax income increase by about 1.4%.
In short, Trump’s policies primarily benefited rich elites.
The anti-poverty organization Oxfam reported in 2025:
Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers. Thanks to a tax code that favors income from wealth over income from work—and a slew of tax-avoidance strategies—the richest among us end up paying a smaller percentage of their income to the federal government than most working families.
Here’s what we know:
- In 2024, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion OR $3.9 billion per day. There were 74 new billionaires.
- 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 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
- According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.
Historical US tax rates on the rich and corporations
Trump and his billionaire allies frequently complain that taxes are supposedly too high, but this is simply not true historically.
The top marginal income tax throughout most of US history was much higher.
In 1944 and 1945, during World War II, the highest marginal income tax rate was 94%.
The richest Americans paid an income tax rate of 91% throughout the 1950s and into the early ’60s, in the so-called “golden era” of US capitalism, which was praised for fostering a strong middle class.
Even into the 1970s, the income of the richest Americans was still taxed around 70%.
It was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s who massively slashed taxes on the rich, from 70% to 28%.
Trump continued Reagan’s pro-elite policies and reduced the highest marginal income tax rate to 37% in 2018.
(These income taxes, however, do not account for the fact that much of the wealth of the rich comes from capital gains on assets they own, not ordinary income.)
It is not just US taxes on rich individuals that have been slashed, but also taxes on corporations.
In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s the corporate income tax rate ranged from 48% to 53%. Again, this was the “golden era” of US capitalism.
Reagan reduced this to 34%, and Trump cut it to 21% during his first term.
Now in his second term, Trump wants to reduce it even further.
In terms of the revenue that the US government has received from corporate taxes, it has steadily fallen as a percentage of GDP.
In the 1950s, corporate income tax revenue represented approximately 5% of GDP.
In the 1960s, it fell to around 3.5%. By the 1970s, it decreased to roughly 2.7%. Under Reagan, it reached a low of 1%. Today, it’s 1.6% of GDP.
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-03-30 at 10:59
US sham democracy is a defacto authoritarian dictatorship of, by and for the billionaires. However there is old money (Wall Street) and there is new money (vulture capital fund managers, techbros eg the PayPal mafia) and we may be witnessing a power struggle between the two.
“Traditional” controllers of the Deep State were the private bankers who bought and colluded with the MIC and other Industrialists (“robber barons” of the “gilded age” eg railroad, oil, steel etc tycoons – who actually did build infrastructure). They manufactured consent using propaganda from a prostitute media which enabled them to install prostitute politicians through which they controlled and expanded their empire by their bought and paid for domestic and international goon squads, the FBI and CIA, the police and the military.
Yanis Varoufakis has described the new money forces trying to take over, applying his term Techno-feudalism and stating there is a struggle between the East Coast (Wall Street) and West Coast (Silicon Valley).
Who are the new Technofeudal overlords who are intent on wresting power from the old masters of the universe, and how is this struggle unfolding?
Are old fashioned private bankers being replaced by vulture capitalist fund managers, is old style currency being replaced by CBDCs and cryptocurrencies? Certainly Techbros like the PayPal Mafia would love to establish their own digital monetary ecosystem by which they would exert total control over all of society, to a far greater extent than traditional bankers had already done.
The panopticon is already in place. There are ubiquitous tiny cameras on every street corner and in every room of every commercial and public building. Facial recognition software and precise time and place localisation of individuals via the GPS of their smartphones, not to mention ability to monitor all our comminications and social media posts and banking activities, track us continuously. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know TPTB were already vacuuming up all our personal information more than a decade ago.
The billionaires may be megalomaniacal sociopaths but they are not stupid. They are well aware that the obscenely inflated “everything bubble” of the stockmarket is due to pop and the $37 trillion of US public debt and almost $20 trillion of US private debt are unpayable and are guaranteed to default. Such financial collapse will obliterate all their wealth in the blink of an eye.
What are the billionaires likely to do to preserve their wealth in the face of such threats? How will they maintain their control over the masses as social inequality spirals out of control and the proles start brandishing the pitchforks and torches?
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-03-30 at 11:07
Whitney Webb seems to have done the most research on these questions. Another credible commentator is financial expert Alex Krainer. Please discuss.
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-03-30 at 11:19
Global South debt vs US debt:
China’s loans today to Global South countries have enabled the latter to gain much needed infrastructure to further accelerate their development in a virtuous spiral. In cases where debtor countries ended up in financial strife, China was willing to renegotiate or even FORGAVE the debt, as they did for >20 African countries.
Western lying media propaganda outlets accused China of “debt trap diplomacy”, but even rabid western neoliberal economists, when looking at the facts, admitted this was untrue, there was NO Chinese debt trap.
Western accusations against China were 100% projection – a refection of Western debt trap strategies (especially USA’s dirty tricks via the IMF, World Bank etc), with examples too numerous to count, over many decades.
Ben Norton’s brilliant discourse:
https://podbay.fm/p/the-socialist-program-with-brian-becker/e/1743071400
Listen carefully to how the USA screwed the Poles in the latter part of the interview.
The best introduction to this topic is the “Confessions of an economic hitman” series by John Perkins. These dirty tricks were emulated by the Germans against fellow Europeans, the example of Greece being the most prominent.
There is only one way for Global South countries to get out of the trap of odious Western debt and the perpetual debt slavery imposed on them by the USA and Western Europe: join the BRICS.
OTOH, the biggest debtor country today is the USA with $37 trillion in public debt and almost $20 trillion in private debt, an entirely different situation. The latter will be used by private bankers to keep the US population enslaved. The former is owed by the US government to various entities, the largest creditors being the Japanese and Chinese, but it is also owed to others such as US pension funds that had purchased US T-Bills. Non-stupid younger USAnians will understand that their future pensions are unfunded liabilities which will NEVER be paid out, due to guaranteed eventual US DEFAULT of the debt.
This default may take the form of unilateral refusal to pay on the part of the US establishment, declaring they are broke, the creditor entities having no means to enforce payment. Most likely however it will take the form of devaluation of the USD by sudden, spectacular currency debasement. The USA will hyperinflate their debt away. When it costs USD $1,000 to buy one loaf of bread, the USA will then easily be able to pay off their $37 trillion in public debt with their funny money. US pensions will indeed be paid out, but instead of lasting for 20 years, it will only fund pensioners for 20 days. After that? Eviction and starvation on the streets.
This sudden USD debasement will take the form of an ambush, planned and arranged by the US financial establishment, who will set up an alternative system of currency eg programmable CBDCs, that can be immediately implemented as soon as they pull the plug so as not to completely crash their domestic economy. The US private banks and investment funds, in collusion with their bought-and-paid-for US government, will of course ensure that all US TBills owed to them will be paid out at 100 cents on the (new CBDC) dollar before they pull the plug.
The financial expert Alex Krainer has postulated this scenario which certainly seems the most likely way the always duplicitous US Establishment will deal with their impossible debt.
Advice to all non-stupid people: sell all your USD denominated financial assets now. Use it to buy real world assets eg land on which you can grow food.
JonnyJames
2025-03-30 at 12:44
Wow, lots of good stuff in your comments Eric. Millions in the US and UK still believe that they live in a “democracy” and a “free market” and are somehow better than “Oriental Despotism” and all that ol’ racist nonsense.
I’ve been ranting about the institutional corruption, outright criminality, complete lack of democratic accountability, etc.for years. Yet the response is usually crickets. (or attack the messenger mentality)
Many people would rather remain blissfully ignorant, or in deep denial. The faithful followers of “la religion civile” would lose their whole identity, and suffer massive psychological and emotional distress if they admitted the ugly truth. This applies to people from all levels of education and intelligence, IMO.
Politics and economics is not “science”, it is a matter of human psychology, which I have little knowledge of. The politics and economics departments in the universities should be merged with psychology departments.
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-03-30 at 19:12
JJ:
I, like you, am here to learn about matters of Geopolitical Economics and Finance, which I am no expert in.
The more I learn, the more questions I have.
I would be most interested to hear discussions regarding the questions raised above, hosted by Ben or Radhika, and interviewing Whitney Webb and/or Alex Krainer.
JonnyJames
2025-03-31 at 11:11
Yes and we can “take the piss” and have a good laugh at the kakistocracy’s expense while we learn more.
Energieerhaltungssatz
2025-04-03 at 07:07
Calling these bandits “elites” is irrational. Positive words should not be used to describe this fraudsters.
Don´t accept such fake definitions or misinterpretations of hijacked words, otherwise they will repeat these rhetorical tricks again to distract you from what they are actually doing or what they really are.
JonnyJames
2025-04-04 at 13:54
Yeah, instead of “hawks” they are warmongers, mass murderers and genocidal maniacs. Instead of “elites” it is the kleptocratic oligarchy. Instead of “democracy” it is inverted totalitariansism, or techno-totalitarian neo-feudalism. It’s always more fun to develop vocabulary that is more accurate.