Day 79: The Gilded Age and the Gullible
I was too lazy today to use AI to generate an image, so here is an apropos editorial cartoon I found on Musk's dumpster fire. God bless editorial cartoonists, some of whom have resigned from their jobs because of censorship in this dark age of ignorance and intolerance.
Mark Twain, back in 1873, published a book for these times. It was called The Gilded Age and dealt with the political corruption and materialism of Feurer Trump's favorite American period, the late 19th Century. Twain's legendary wit is on display from the title itself - a "gilded age" being a fraudulent substitute for an authentic golden age.
As Trump is so fond of repeating, the late 19th Century was a time when the US government was funded by tariffs on international trade. It wasn't until the early 20th Century that America switched to a progressive income tax to fund the government with the ratification of the 16th Amendment. But why the switch?
Simply, tariffs are a tax on the American people, one indifferent to income. It is regressive in that a tariff hits the poor harder than the rich, while a progressive income tax is, as the name suggests, one that scales up with wealth. This is why the wealthiest Americans of the period staunchly opposed the switch to a progressive income tax because they knew that the tax burden would now be shifted to those more able to pay. As Jessie Eisinger relates in his Pro Publica article:
They [tariffs] were regressive, costing working people a far greater percentage of their income than the rich. In one of his speeches, [Democratic congressman from Tennessee Cordell] Hull attacked the new dominant class of oligarchs: “The world has never seen such colossal fortunes as we behold in the present age ... the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers, with their aggregated billions of hoarded wealth.”
Hull said, “It would seem that this class of people consider themselves almost immune from any kind of taxation.”
Despite the opposition of wealthy northern Republicans, the 16th Amendment passed its ratification process and the progressive income tax became law, shifting the financial burden of taxes to the wealthiest Americans instead of the poorest.
So, why is America now being forced back on a regressive taxation policy after over a century of progressive taxation?
The answer is obvious: Trump 2.0 is an administration of billionaires for billionaires. As such, they are doing everything they can to shift the financial burden of running a nation back onto the backs of the working class.
It needs to be recalled that Donald Trump nearly doubled the national debt in a mere four years during his first term. Part of the reason why this happened is because Trump cut the corporate tax rate to a more competitive 21% while failing to reduce government spending, an oft-repeated GOP playbook. Now, while I am an inveterate Trump hater, this is one policy position that I did support as America's higher corporate tax rate was chasing businesses to other shores. Trump is correct when he points out that the economy caught fire after the tax cut's passage, an entirely predictable result. After passing this corporate tax rate reduction, Trump later promised a tax cut for the middle class. Not surprisingly, as Trump is no friend of the middle class, that middle-class tax cut never materialized, and only made a brief reappearance in the 2020 campaign season as middle-class voter bait (apparently, Trump only had a concept of a tax plan).
Now, in Trump 2.0, the administration, along with its cadre of millionaires and billionaires that financed Trump's cash-starved 2024 campaign, have their hearts set on another tax cut of 1.5 trillion dollars, something that would, again, blow the debt out of the water. So, they need a plan to cover those costs as the exploding debt under Trump 1.0 was one of the few areas that got some pushback from his base. With his polling numbers already tanking even before his 'honeymoon period' is over, he needs a plan to prevent alienating the few friends that remain to him.
This is where DOGE comes in.
If you think DOGE has anything to do with government efficiency, you are being tricked. Rather, it has everything to do with cutting government departments as a way of recouping cash to pay for the billionaires' tax cut. The $1 trillion goal gives the game away, as the billionaire's tax cut is expected to cost $1.5 trillion (the $500 billion will be carried as debt as is always the case with ever-worsening GOP spending).
But there is a problem: alleged Ketamine-addict Elon Musk has failed miserably to find $1 trillion in "waste, fraud, and abuse" in his Muskrats' reckless charge to purge the federal government. Even on DOGE's own website, they only account for $140 billion, a target far short of the $1 trillion in savings Elon "I cheat at video games" Musk promised to deliver to the American people (and that is ignoring the many accounting mistakes uncovered in the tallying of the figure). This is a big problem when an administration has to appear to pay for the huge price tag of tax relief for millionaires and billionaires. So, what to do?
Why, in addition to paying for that giveaway to the richest Americans by cutting government spending to the bone with insanely cruel cuts, you also pass the bill on to the American working class by having them pay for it via one of the largest middle-class tax increases in US history, which is to say with tariffs. That is what this trade war is all about. Trump is quite clear about this rationale when he crows about how wonderful tariffs were back in the 19th Century. In many ways, Trump's trade war is a value-added tax scheme, just without removing existing taxes on the working class and replacing them with a VAT. Congratulations, Trump voters! You are now effectively double-taxed for the benefit of detached millionaires and billionaires who see you as little more than pawns on their chessboard, pawns only fit for mindlessly putting screws in iPhones in the brave new Trump economy.
Even some MAGA defenders are starting to realize the scam Trump is pulling on them:
I find their anger delicious. They understood the coming scam, which is why they supported Trump, but they didn't understand how treacherous Trump and his minions are. And they got played. Now they find themselves not only frozen out on the big score but also left holding the bag. It was the ultimate double-cross. Suckers.
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Donald Trump has announced that at midnight tonight, April 9, 2025, tariffs of 104% will go into effect on China.
President Trump’s next round of punishing tariffs on some of America’s largest trading partners was set to go into effect just after midnight on Wednesday, including stiff new levies that will increase import taxes on Chinese goods by at least 104 percent.
This might well be a tipping point for the globe.
Trump is being told that China has no choice but to back off on its retaliatory tariffs because China only imports roughly 20% of what America imports from China, hence a trade war will hurt China far more than it will hurt us. This is the same reason why countries like, say, Vietnam have been willing to give in to Trump's extortionary demands. However, China is different. While China will be hurt by a trade war with the US, it has sufficiently deep pockets to weather such a storm. It also has vast trading relationships that extend beyond America (it is, after all, the second-largest economy in the world). And lastly, it has, you know, a MASSIVE military it has been building for the past three decades. In other words, Trump is gambling - insanely - that a major global power, indeed, a rival to America itself, one that commands considerable resources of its own, will buckle. Understanding not just the power balance sheet but also the importance China places on being respected as a major power, Trump is making a tremendously reckless gamble.
In 2025, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists updated their 'Doomsday Clock' to 89 minutes to midnight, the closest to disaster it has ever been:
In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.
If Trump goes through with his tariff threats against China, in just two hours from when I write these words, the doomsday clock might jump closer to midnight by quite a bit.
Tick tock...
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